Unlock new possibilities with Halon Engage 10: Introducing Bounce Patrol and more!

Welcome to the unveiling of Halon Engage 10 – the latest milestone in our journey to empower large-scale senders. We're excited to introduce you to a host of enhancements that make this release a must-have for your email infrastructure. Halon prides itself on being the most modern, future-proof email infrastructure on the market. Each new release offers a range of DevOps elements to further empower your team and elevate their speed, efficiency, and productivity.

10 and beyond: Halon Engage's quarterly versioning

We are always striving to meet the evolving needs of our clients, be at the forefront of innovation, and consistently surpass industry standards. To better reflect our rolling software update model which you know and love, we're implementing a fresh versioning approach for our quarterly software releases. From now on, Halon Engage's version number will rise with each quarterly release, independently of individual package versions. Halon Engage 10 is the latest version of Halon Engage.

Discover the key features and improvements:

Bounce Patrol: Simplified bounce classification with built-in patterns, reducing the time and effort needed for email management.
Effortless mobile push notifications: Build fast and robust email-triggered notification flows to your mobile application(s) directly from your email flow.
Lightning-fast integrations with Connect’s background HTTP requests: Fetch real-time data from external sources like JSON or REST APIs without impeding performance.
Injection API: Seamless app integration with tailored submission like RabbitMQ, on top of SMTP and HTTP.

Bounce Patrol: Simplifying bounce message handling

Let's dive into the star of the show – Bounce Patrol. This feature simplifies your life by offering multiple options for classifying bounces. You can use our built-in classification patterns, leverage your existing system’s patterns, or combine both approaches. The best part? Bounce Patrol’s classification patterns are available and updated via a separate package in the software repositories for fast and convenient updates. Need customizations? No problem. You can swiftly create overrides to maintain patterns according to your preferences. Plus, the built-in category names can be easily mapped to your existing system for a seamless migration. Bounce Patrol not only simplifies your life by offering multiple options for classifying bounce messages but also enhances your operational team's experience. By utilizing this feature to categorize bounces, you can effortlessly clean up traffic and proactively mitigate issues, such as blockages, ensuring a smoother and more efficient email handling process.

Mobile Push: Effortless mobile push integration

Say hello to our new Connect feature. It enables the delivery of mobile push notifications from your email flow. Supporting both Apple’s APN and Google’s Firebase (FCM), Connect enables you to build fast and robust email-triggered notification flows to mobile applications.

Lightning-fast integrations with Connect’s background HTTP requests

Another exciting addition to Connect is the ability to make background HTTP requests using the Ultra IO architecture. This powerful feature allows you to fetch real-time data from external sources like JSON or REST APIs without impeding performance. This is ideal for when you want to make policy decisions based on information that changes frequently or when you need to make lookups that cannot be cached, such as per-message spam classification.

New ways to submit messages with the new injection API

We understand that every sender’s architecture is unique. That’s why we are introducing the new Injection API. This native plugin API seamlessly integrates with your message generation application, providing an alternative when SMTP or HTTP doesn't quite fit the bill. Traditionally, email senders inject messages to be delivered into Halon Engage over either SMTP (the traditional email protocol) or HTTP. However, we know that no two senders’ infrastructure is identical. To accommodate the best possible fit, performance, and robustness, we've prepared ready-made connectors for various protocols, including RabbitMQ.

Release highlights

Want a summary of these exciting updates? Here are the nuggets in video format!

Additional improvements

In addition to the featured improvements, we've also made many additional enhancements, including:

Clustered summary view: Consolidates all server queues into a single view, providing instant insights into delivery performance or issues.
Redis module improvement: Supports Sentinel for active/passive failover and multiple servers/profiles, with a corresponding rate limit and reputation tracking module.
Connection pooling mode: Building upon the global active queue grouping mechanism introduced in the previous quarterly release, we've added a new connection pooling mode. This mode optimizes the matching to group ID for increased efficiency and faster delivery.
Backoff module enhancements: Our backoff module now offers the capability to suspend the queue entirely for a specified duration. Additionally, you can define the rate of errors needed for a particular pattern rule to trigger, enhancing error management.
Web administration advancements: The web administration now supports reverse proxies and automatic login when behind one, which is useful for single-sign-on (SSO).
New delivery sink module: Helps to simulate workloads and test queue policies to ensure optimal performance.
New file pickup and delivery modules: We have introduced new modules for file pickup and file delivery, leveraging the capabilities of the injection API and queue delivery API, further enhancing the testing experience.

And... That's a wrap! The Halon Enage 10 update is available in our repositories via your Linux distribution’s built-in update mechanism. If you want to speak to us about this new release, reach out to us directly at support@halon.io.