A new year means a new quarterly release of Halon Engage, our solution for large email senders. Version 14 is brimming with new capabilities designed to help you adapt, streamline, and optimize your email delivery. This release introduces a series of AI solutions that empowers you to stay ahead of the curve, scale faster and deliver a world-class service to your customers.  Delivery Orchestrator for fair and dynamic delivery throttling, Delivery Guru’s AI-powered bounce classification engine for more accurate handling of SMTP bounce messages, and full horizontal auto-scaling on Kubernetes (K8s) for effortless infrastructure scalability.

Key features and enhancements:

• Delivery Guru: AI-based bounce classification – stay ahead of evolving bounce patterns without constant manual updates.
  
  
• Delivery Orchestrator – intelligently and fairly distribute delivery throttles across clusters for optimal resource usage.
  
  
• Cloud Path: full K8s auto-scaling – instantly respond to changing email volumes with fully automatic horizontal scaling.
  
  
• Connect: Kafka and PostgreSQL integrations – broaden your data ecosystem and streamline operational insights.

Let’s dive deeper into these:
 

1. Delivery Guru: AI-powered bounce classification
   We’re proud to introduce a key component of Delivery Guru - an AI-based bounce classification engine that builds upon our existing Bounce Patrol. This engine uses a locally running, fast, and accurate machine learning model that eliminates the need for constantly revising bounce categorization rules. Bounce classification is one of the base models of Delivery Guru, laying a strong foundation for the advanced AI models that will follow. By accurately classifying new SMTP bounce messages and adapting to changing response patterns from receivers, Delivery Guru relieves your deliverability team of tedious manual updates.
   
   
2. Delivery Orchestrator
   In multi-instance clusters, delivering to destinations with strict connection limits can be tricky. Delivery Orchestrator provides intelligent, dynamic, and fair distribution of traffic shaping slots across instances, resulting in better resource utilization. Unlike solutions that rely on external databases like Redis, this approach has near-zero performance penalty and ensures more streamlined resource management.
   
   
3. Cloud Path: Full auto-scaling on K8s
   Halon Engage now supports automatic scaling both up and down using Kubernetes. Messages in the queue during scale-down are safely transferred to other instances. Delivery throttle parameters, such as concurrency limits, automatically adjust as the number of replicas changes. New instances appear automatically in the web administration interface, making resource optimization and administration significantly simpler and more robust.
   
   
4. Connect: Kafka and PostgreSQL
   We’ve expanded our collection of ready-made integrations to include Kafka and PostgreSQL. By tapping into these data sources, you can streamline decision-making, enhance analytics, and respond to evolving needs more efficiently.
   
   
5. Command & Control: Outbound Connection Pool Ramp-Up
   Fine-tune how quickly outbound connections scale up with the new connect interval parameter. This allows persistent connection reuse and smoother ramp-up to destination-specific connection goals, ensuring enhanced stability and performance.
   
   

Smaller but notable improvements

• The web administration interface now offers better usability, including auto-completion in places like delivery policy and throttles, and the ability to create and share customized views for greater workflow efficiency.
• The HTTP submission API supports compression, enabling faster transfers and lower transit costs.
• BIMI verification supports additional hash types (SHA 256 and SHA 512).
• stdout logging has been introduced, which is particularly useful for containerized deployments on K8s.

Ready to experience Halon Engage 14?

If you’re already a customer, simply upgrade to the latest version to enjoy these new capabilities. If you’re evaluating solutions, now is the perfect time to discover how Halon Engage can help you deliver email at scale - smarter, faster, and with greater reliability.

Get in touch with our team or explore our documentation to learn more about making the most of Halon Engage 14.