Not really. However, there will probably be a window in which both oldpath and newpath refer to the file being renamed. But that's not ev

Not really. However, there will probably be a window in which both oldpath and newpath refer to the file being renamed. But that's not even the main point. 1. Move happens after email is sent, so there is a window where email is already being sent but file still exists. 2. Even if you do it before, there's still a window between os.listdir() and os.remove() 3. Complexity is O(N^2) due to listdir() + getctime() being called on every iteration. If you just want to ensure order, it probably works fine at a small scale. But it would be unwise to run multiple consumers on a single instance, and impossible to run them on multiple instances.