Happy New Year from team Halon! As well as welcoming a new year, we also say a warm hello to our latest  quarterly release of Halon Protect, our solution for mailbox providers. Version 14 includes fully automatic horizontal auto-scaling on Kubernetes, Delivery Orchestrator for sharing and fair distribution of delivery throttles, and the first of many AI-powered capabilities - Delivery Guru’s real-time classification of delivery failure responses.

Key features and enhancements:

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

Let’s dive deeper into these new features:

1. Cloud Path: Full auto-scaling on K8s
   Halon Protect now supports horizontal auto-scaling on Kubernetes, allowing you to automatically adapt to changing capacity needs. Messages in queue during scale-down are safely transferred, while throttles like concurrency limits adjust dynamically as replicas change. New instances also appear automatically in the web administration interface, ensuring smoother scaling, optimized resources, and improved business continuity.
   
   
2. Delivery Orchestrator
   Balancing delivery throttles across multiple instances is now simpler and more effective. Delivery Orchestrator distributes traffic shaping slots intelligently and fairly, unlike other solutions that depend on external databases. This results in stable performance and resource utilization without the added overhead.
   
   
3. Delivery Guru: AI-based bounce classification
   Delivery Guru’s AI-driven bounce classification is a locally running model that eliminates the need for manual bounce categorization updates, ensuring your system remains up-to-date as receiving mail systems evolve. This bounce classification is just the beginning—it's a foundational model within Delivery Guru that sets the stage for more advanced AI models in the future.
   
   
4. Connect: Kafka and PostgreSQL
   Halon Protect now integrates seamlessly with Kafka and PostgreSQL, giving you more options to capture, process, and analyze your data, and supporting more agile operations.
   
   
   

Smaller but notable improvements

• The web administration interface in Halon Protect now offers enhanced usability, with features like auto-completion for delivery policy configurations and throttles, as well as the ability to create and share customized views, making day-to-day operations more streamlined and efficient for administrators.
• BIMI verification now supports more hash types (SHA 256 and SHA 512), enhancing compatibility and trust signals.
• The HTTP submission API supports compression, improving transfer speed and reducing costs.
• stdout logging is supported, which streamlines containerized deployments and operations in K8s environments.

Ready to experience Halon Protect 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 Protect 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 Protect 14.