We're excited to kick off 2024 with the unveiling of Halon Engage 11, fuelled by your invaluable feedback! We've poured your suggestions and requests into this feature-packed upgrade, transforming Halon Engage into a powerful tool that works just the way you need it. 

Discover the key features and improvements: 

• Customizable dashboard: get the ultimate dashboard experience with the ability to tailor your dashboards just the way you like them. Configure your dashboard to perfectly match your requirements to solve delivery issues even faster.
• Built-in historical logging: access both real-time and historical data all in one place, eliminating the need to go back and forth between different user interfaces.
• AMP up your emails: our extended HTTP submission component now supports AMP in building dynamic and engaging email body content. 

Your dashboard, your way

With Halon Engage 11, you have the power to tailor your dashboards to best suit your needs. Our robust customization options allow you to configure your dashboard to perfectly match your unique requirements. Whether it's detecting, analyzing, or resolving delivery issues, you can now do it with lightning speed and efficiency.

The queue distribution page alone offers a plethora of customization options. You can create an aggregate view down to individual counter fields, and save it as a component on your dashboard. Additionally, you can make these views permanent, making it easier than ever to return to your personalized dashboards at any time.

All your log data, in one place

Gone are the days of toggling between different user interfaces to access real-time and historical data. You can now see what's happening right now (Delivery Insights) and what happened before, all in one place. 

Harnessing ElasticSearch as the backend, this feature goes beyond the capabilities of Elastic's Kibana, offering advanced email-specific data visualization controls. Think of our interactive visualizations not just as a display but as a gateway to insights. This feature brilliantly combines historical and real-time data analysis. It's like having a detective's magnifying glass that can zoom in on the smallest details of the past and present. With active filters and automatic reloads, this visualization doesn't just show you data; it brings it to life.

Sending emails just got a lot more interesting with Extended HTTP Submission API for AMP

We've enhanced our  Extended HTTP submission API to support sending AMP emails. If you're already using other submission interfaces like SMTP, no need to worry - nothing changes for you. You could always submit AMP emails for delivery. But for those of you leveraging our Extended HTTP Submission API, which offers interesting features such as Templating with Handlebars and engagement tracking, we've got something special for you. We now fully support AMP template building and tracking.

With AMP, you can create fun and captivating email content that rivals the experience of a dynamic website. Take advantage of our Extended HTTP Submission API to deliver engaging and interactive emails like never before.

Additional improvements

As usual, the quarterly feature release is packed with other various enhancements. 

• For accountability and security purposes, the web UI now maintains a log of all API calls made by administrators, providing a detailed history of their actions.

• Expanded capability for troubleshooting outbound connections with two new options in halonctl queue trace command.

  --elapsed:  shows the time between the events.

  --aggregated:  shows the time since the start

• In very large-scale deployments using HAProxy, we've introduced the capability to utilize multiple instance source IP addresses for connections to the proxy, effectively preventing TCP port exhaustion.
• smtpd restarts are faster now, even if there are large queues to be reloaded from disk and delivered. This efficiency is due to the concurrent execution of delivery and loading operations.
• New additions to Halon Scripting Language:
  • header_addresslist_compile(): Function for creating a properly formatted Header string of addresses, which together with the improved header_addresslist_extract() allows you to easily modify address headers.
  • mimeword_encode() and mimeword_decode() functions for MIME encoded-word syntax.
  • Map merge() method for adding items to arrays or increment numbers. 
• New consume-only, spool-in queue directory type, which is only drained and useful during migration of queue folders
• All our projects now include so-called Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) files for our client’s software supply chain security workflow.

A heartfelt thank you to all our incredible clients for sharing your wishes with us and making Halon harder, better, faster, stronger! If you want to speak to us about this new release, reach out to us directly at support@halon.io.