As the festive season draws near, we have a few presents up our sleeves for our clients and prospects that will end your year on a high!
Halon Engage 17 is here, delivering a set of improvements in outbound abuse prevention and operational efficiency. This release introduces Abuse Guard, a new feature inside Sender Shield that helps sending providers detect risky sending behavior early and protect cluster-wide reputation before issues escalate. It also includes integrated HTTP submission and engagement tracking, eliminating the need for an additional container while boosting performance and reducing maintenance overhead.
On top of that, we’re adding OpenID Connect for modern SSO, expanding accessibility improvements across the web admin interface, and enabling full S/MIME protection for gateway-enforced encryption and signing. This means faster, safer operations with more control. Let's dig in!
Introducing Sender Shield: Abuse Guard
Abuse Guard is the latest addition to Sender Shield, our suite of features that helps providers and ESPs send more responsibly, safely, and with greater operational control. As the first step in our larger effort to combat outbound abuse, Abuse Guard continuously monitors early warning signals such as delivery slowdowns, failure rates, and sudden volume bursts, and alerts operators the moment behavior turns risky.
If thresholds are crossed, it can automatically alert the deliverability/abuse team or even pause a tenant’s traffic to protect the reputation and stability of the entire cluster. Abuse Guard gives large-scale senders a proactive, intelligent safeguard against emerging abuse, with more adaptive capabilities on the way.
Integrated HTTP submission and engagement tracking
Halon Engage now includes an integrated HTTP submission and tracking component. That means you no longer need a separate container/process, dramatically reducing the overall maintenance footprint while providing higher throughput by reducing overhead. We’ve also added content compression support, significantly shrinking injection payload sizes. For many providers, this can directly reduce data transfer costs while improving overall injection efficiency.
OpenID Connect support for the web administration interface
Because single sign-on shouldn’t require workarounds.
Halon’s web administration interface now includes full support for OpenID Connect (OIDC), which is the de facto standard for modern single sign-on (SSO). It’s an interoperable authentication protocol that builds on OAuth 2.0 (RFC6749 and RFC6750) to allow users to sign in to applications securely using an identity provider. Benefits of this feature include:
- Faster, simpler SSO integration
- No proxy required for a cleaner architecture
- Better interoperability across modern platforms.
Accessibility improvements across the web admin interface
Email infrastructure is mission-critical and should be accessible by everyone.
It’s important to make sure that everyone, including people with disabilities, can use the tools your business relies on. Meeting accessibility standards isn’t just a compliance exercise; it removes friction for your teams, supports diverse teams, and ultimately improves productivity.
WCAG, along with the European EN 301 549 standard, provide a clear framework for evaluating whether tools meet these expectations. Halon’s web administration interface is built with accessibility in mind. In Halon Protect 17, we’ve introduced numerous improvements, such as color and contrast adjustments, text resizing capability, alternative functionality to dragging movements, and improved content structure to enhance accessibility. We’ve also added processes and automated checks before each software release to ensure new features don’t introduce regressions.
Full S/MIME support for gateway-enforced encryption
A major security upgrade for organizations that require end-to-end standards. S/MIME is the most widely supported standard for public-key encryption and signing of email, and is built into the majority of modern email clients.
Building upon our existing PKCS7 signing functionality, we’ve now added full support for Cryptographic Message Syntax (CMS), including signing, verification, encryption, and decryption.
This enables organization-wide, gateway-enforced email encryption without requiring users to change tools or workflows. This is ideal for providers supporting regulated industries or customers with strict security requirements.
Dropping libspf2 library dependency
Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is an old but fundamental protocol to ensure that a server is authorized to send email from a given MAIL FROM domain name. The open source libspf2 library has been the de-facto standard for many years, but now the time has come for us to move on to an in-house implementation that we can couple more tightly with our software.
Getting started
Halon Engage 17 is now available for rollout. If you’d like a walkthrough of the new features or help planning your upgrade, get in touch with your Halon representative or request a demo.
Finally, we’d like to wish all our clients, partners, and the wider community happy holidays and a festive season ahead.