We are thrilled to announce the latest Halon Protect quarterly release; Halon Protect 10. With this update comes a wide range of new features and improvements designed to enhance a mailbox provider’s email security and management experience. In this quarterly release, you will see that Connect serves as the centerpiece in delivering the key updates. At Halon, we always strive to deliver a DevOps-friendly environment, so consider each of these updates as key components in further enhancing your team's speed, efficiency, and productivity.

10 and beyond: Halon Protect's quarterly versioning

We're constantly evolving to meet your needs and surpass industry standards. To better reflect our rolling software update model which you know and love, we're introducing a fresh approach to versioning for Halon Protect. From now on, Halon Protect's version number will rise with each quarterly release, independently of individual package versions.

Discover the key features and improvements: 

• Effortless mobile push integration: 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.

Mobile Push: Effortless mobile push integration

Introducing our new exciting Connect feature - Mobile Push! This addition enables you to generate mobile notifications directly from the policy engine that processes your email. Whether you prefer Apple's APN or Google's Firebase (FCM), this feature makes it effortless to build fast and robust email-triggered notification flows to mobile applications. Moreover, these notifications remain visible to the end user even when the mobile application is running in the background, guaranteeing uninterrupted communication.

Lightning-fast integrations with Connect’s background HTTP requests

We have also added a brand new feature for making background HTTP requests, harnessing the capabilities of the Ultra IO architecture. This powerful functionality enables scripts to query external APIs in real time, without compromising performance. This feature is perfect when you need to make policy decisions based on information that changes frequently or is unique to a message. It also reduces delivery times when executing multiple queries by firing them concurrently, for example when leveraging several content filter engines and weighing their result against each other.

New ways to submit messages with the new injection API

We know that every mailbox provider has specific requirements, and that's why we're unveiling the Injection API, a native plugin API for accepting messages. While Halon Protect typically receives inbound internet email messages via SMTP, there are situations where service providers employ alternative email flows. With this new injection API, you can seamlessly integrate your applications to submit messages when SMTP or HTTP isn't the optimal choice. To help you save time and expedite the process, we've also developed pre-configured connectors for a range of protocols, including RabbitMQ.

Highlights at a glance:

For a quick overview of these updates, take a look at our video below: 

Additional improvements

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

• Redis module improvement: Supports Sentinel for active/passive failover and multiple servers/profiles, with a corresponding rate limit and reputation tracking module.
• 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.
• Clustered summary view: Consolidates all server queues into a single view, providing instant insights into delivery performance or issues.
  
  And... That's a wrap! The Halon Protect 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.