Since the first Halon MTA release in 2008, we’ve had a text-based queue query syntax called HQL (a play on SQL) as part of our SOAP API. While it has served us well during all those years, it was time to move on to something more modern. The new 5.3 release (codename “buffy”) comes with a Protocol Buffers and JSON API which introduces a programmatic approach to queue operations.

The request and response body schemas are available on our Github page. For your convenience, the QueueList, QueueGroupBy, QueueUnload and QueueUpdate requests all have the same Condition argument. Those API calls can operate on both the active and defer queues, as well as messages on hold. That is why the condition argument both contains things like retry count, as well as resolved remote MX and IP. You can specify as many conditions as you like, and create logic-or expressions by specifying multiple conditions of the same type. There are exact matching, regular expressions, and intervals for integers and date/time. Needless to say; incredibly powerful.

The QueueGroupBy call returns the distribution based on the grouping parameters and intervals you choose; such as number of messages in various age buckets, grouped by recipient domain. This is useful for getting an overview of a large queue. Queries are blazingly fast, even with very large queues. All queue metadata (essentially the fields available as conditions) is loaded into memory, in order for the virtual sub-queues to work.

Halon 5.3 also comes with a new CLI called halonctl. It happens to be very useful when working with our API, as it can output the API request and response bodies for the command you run in JSON format. As you can se in the example below, the request body is printed first: 

$ halonctl queue update --bounce --state DEFER --jobid foobar --json-request --json
{
    "conditions": {
        "queues": [
            {
                "queue": "DEFER"
                ...

The CLI covers all the functionality of the product, and is a great complement to the web administration. Its configuration management sub-commands are useful for integrating Halon MTA instances into provisioning, deployment and CI/CD toolchains such as Puppet or Chef, where running commands is easier than making API calls.

Halon 5.3 comes with many other great improvements; such as connection pooling, a more efficient queue quota function, a new on-disk queue format and an Iconv() class for internationalisation conversion. Please see the release notes for a complete list of changes. We hope that you will enjoy this release as much as we do! If you are new to Halon, don’t hesitate to contact us, or dig into all our documentation that is available publicly on our website.