MailSlot
{{redirects|Mailslot|the postal delivery receptacle|Letter box}}
Mailslot was a one-way interprocess communication mechanism, available on the Microsoft Windows operating system up until Windows 11 24H2,https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/inside-this-update-93c5c27c-f96e-43c2-a08e-5812d92f220d#windowsupdate=26100 that allowed communication between processes both locally and over a network. The use of Mailslots was generally simpler than named pipes or sockets when a relatively small number of relatively short messages were expected to be transmitted, such as for example infrequent state-change messages, or as part of a peer-discovery protocol. The Mailslot mechanism allowed for short message broadcasts ("datagrams") to all listening computers across a given network domain.
Features
Mailslots functioned as a server-client interface. A server could create a Mailslot, and a client could write to it by name. Only the server could read the mailslot, as such mailslots represented a one-way communication mechanism. A server-client interface could consist of two processes communicating locally or across a network. Mailslots operated over the RPC protocol and worked across all computers in the same network domain. Mailslots offered no confirmation that a message had been received. Mailslots were generally a good choice when one client process need to broadcast a message to multiple server processes.
Uses
The most widely known use of the Mailslot IPC mechanism was the Windows Messenger service that was part of the Windows NT-line of products, including Windows XP. The Messenger Service, not to be confused with the MSN Messenger internet chat service, was essentially a Mailslot server that waited for a message to arrive. When a message arrived, it was displayed in a popup onscreen. The NET SEND command was therefore a type of Mailslot client, because it wrote to specified mailslots on a network.
A number of programs also used Mailslots to communicate. Generally these were amateur chat clients and other such programs{{Citation needed|date=March 2013}}. Commercial programs usually prefered pipes or sockets.
Mailslots were implemented as files in a mailslot file system (MSFS). Examples of Mailslots included:
References
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External links
- [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa365576.aspx Mailslots (MSDN Documentation)]
- [http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/8527/Using-Mailslots-for-Interprocess-Communication Using Mailslots for Interprocess Communication]
- [http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/6376/Using-a-Mailslot-to-read-write-data-over-a-network Using a Mailslot to read/write data over a network]
- [https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/storage-at-microsoft/the-beginning-of-the-end-of-remote-mailslots/ba-p/3762048 The beginning of the end of Remote Mailslots]
Category:Inter-process communication
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