Embodiments include a method of controlling message delivery from a publisher application to one or more subscriber applications of a messaging system, the one or more subscriber applications having a plurality of subscriptions registered with a broker application of the messaging system. The method includes generating a unified subscription description representing the plurality of registered subscriptions based on at least one stored intermediate subscription description, where each intermediate subscription description represents one or more registered subscriptions. The method also includes communicating the unified subscription description to the publisher application.