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.
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.
Generally these are amateur chat clients and other such programs[citation needed].