When no destinations are present (e.g. with a fresh installation of DropCopy), the "Send message" and "Send clipboard" menu items show no child destinations, and dragging a file onto the "no local destinations" placeholder gives an error message stating that there are no destinations available – so nothing out-of-the-ordinary.

If, however, you double-click the "no local destinations" placeholder, then in addition to the "no destinations" error message, the "Send message" dialog is also shown (with the heading "Message to send to xxx:").

Granted, the send dialog is initially obscured by the error message, but when the error is dismissed, the dialog remains, and is usable (although presumably any messages get sent to /dev/null…)

I also noticed that the error shown when dropping a file onto the placeholder is fairly generic:

There are no destinations available
Make sure DropCopy is launched on at least one other Mac or iOS device.

And yet the error that is shown when double-clicking to send a message talks specifically about transferring files – something I'd have thought more relevant when dropping files onto the placeholder:

no local destinations available
launch DropCopy on at least one other machine to transfer files between them

 

10base-t interactive support said:

to send a message to a device not present or on the current network, you need to first add it as a manual (ie not automatically discovered) location. then it will appear in the sub menus as an action target.

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I've just realised that my choice of wording for the topic title implied that messages are actually sent, which is not at all what I'd intended. Perhaps "It's possible to activate the send message dialog when no destinations are present" would have been better. You don't happen to do an app that gives users the power of hindsight, do you?