Provided are method, apparatus and computer program product for managing persistence within a messaging system. The method includes evaluating the messaging system's exposure to risk of losing messages. Data relating to nominally-persistent messages held in the system is saved to persistent storage if an evaluating step determines that the exposure exceeds at least one risk threshold. This approach enables a reduction in the number of writes to persistent storage compared with conventional systems in which any message that is labeled persistent will be written to disk, since disk writes can be avoided whenever an evaluation determines that the messaging system's exposure to the risk of losing messages is low.