MailSlot

A Mailslot is a one-way interprocess communication mechanism, available on the Microsoft Windows operating system, that allows communication between processes both locally and over a network. The use of Mailslots is generally simpler than named pipes or sockets when a relatively small number of relatively short messages are expected to be transmitted, such as for example infrequent state-change messages, or as part of a peer-discovery protocol. The Mailslot mechanism allows for short message broadcasts ("datagrams") to all listening computers across a given network domain.

Features

Mailslots function as a server-client interface. A server can create a Mailslot, and a client can write to it by name. Only the server can read the mailslot, as such mailslots represent a one-way communication mechanism. A server-client interface could consist of two processes communicating locally or across a network. Mailslots operate over the RPC protocol and work across all computers in the same network domain. Mailslots offer no confirmation that a message has been received. Mailslots are generally a good choice when one client process must broadcast a message to multiple server processes.