Currently, when messages are sent to Service Bus, they can only be removed by reading/completing them or waiting for them to age-out based on the retention policy. This can often become troublesome for applications that accumulate messages in their dead-letter queue when they do not wish to process them, or for applications with messages that are not actionable after a certain age.
Historically, developers have had to write code that loops to perform destructive reads for the messages that they want to remove. While this is relatively straightforward for purge scenarios, it can be tricky to do correctly when the desire is only to remove messages older than a given point in time.
To make this scenario easier for developers, Service Bus is adding a new operation capable of deleting batches of messages and limiting them to a specific time.