bhosted.nl – Saving time with Halon

The challenge: an on-premises, time saving email solution

Before using Halon, bhosted had a spamfilter on each server, all manually installed and maintained. As this was not kept up-to-date, they ran into issues with too much spam getting through. Their IP address were also blacklisted from time to time. As this could happen on any of the servers, it was always time consuming to fix it and route mail using another IP address.

”The new solution had to be able to route mail to different mailservers and be flexible to change that routing on the fly when domains are moved from one server to another server”, says Marc van de Geijn.

The goal was to save time and have the solution kept up to date automatically and a big plus would be to keep the solution on premises.

The solution: Halon email software

”We at bHosted.nl like to build our own solutions for situations like this. But after evaluating Halon we noticed that Halon had created the solution that would fit our needs perfectly. We could never have built a solution like this on our own.”

Marc and his colleagues considered and evaluated other solutions before finally choosing Halon. But it was the flexibility of HSL, the Halon Scripting Language, and the fact that it’s a scalable on premises solution that made all the difference.
”E-mail is very important for many of our customers. Even more important than their website. If there is a problem with our e-mail solution, we want to be able to directly see what the problem is. We don’t want to depend on some external helpdesk to fix easy problems” says Marc van de Geijn.

The company’s usage of Halon as changed over time. They didn’t plan for it, but now they are also using Halon as their SMTP server. Users can log into the Halon SMTP server and send their messages directly using Halon.
”Also, if we need more processing power for handling our mail, we don’t have to pay extra. We currently use 3 nodes in our Halon cluster, and that is more than enough for our current amount of e-mail. But we know when we need an extra node, it’s very easy to add one. The configuration is copied from the existing cluster to the new node when the new node is added”, says Marc van de Geijn.”

Halon features used at bhosted:

• Incoming and outgoing spam filtering.
• DKIM signing of outgoing messages
• DMARC or only SPF record checking of incoming messages
• SMTP server for bhosted customers
• Routing mail over different IP addresses based on how mail is sent (SMTP, website, webmail, high spam score).
• Rate limiting and blocking of mails from addresses that send out to many bouncing messages within a specific period of time.

”Halon can do more than we expected. We should have chosen Halon earlier. What we appreciate the most is the flexibility and the great support. Most of the times when we have a question, it is answered within an hour”, concludes Marc van de Geijn.

Flexible configuration because of HSL

“Using Halon email platform we were able to consolidate and upgrade several separate email gateways into one on-premises solution, as we don’t want our customers inbound and outbound e-mail being routed over several platforms on different locations in the world.”

Great, professional support

“They have remote access to our Halon cluster, so that makes it very easy for them to log into our systems and look for themselves what the problem is. No logfiles we have to send or other delays in solving the problem.”

A scalable on-premises solution

“We know that when we need an extra node, it’s very easy to add one. The configuration is copied from the existing cluster to the new node when the new node is added.”