This paper presents the slotted-FIFO communication mode that supports communication primitives for the entire spectrum of reliability and ordering requirements of distributed applications: FIFO as well as non-FIFO, and reliable as well as unreliable communication. Hence, the slotted-FIFO communication mode is suitable for multimedia applications, as well as non real-time distributed applications. As FIFO ordering is not required for all messages, message buffering requirements are considerably reduced. Also, message latencies are lower. We quantify such advantages by means of a simulation study. A low overhead protocol implementing slotted-FIFO communication is also presented. The protocol incurs a small resequencing cost.