Spring has sprung in the Northern Hemisphere and so has our latest quarterly release - Halon Protect 15. But this isn't just a new version. It’s a major milestone in our mission to reimagine the future of email operations.

With even more AI-driven innovation, this release is designed to take your email infrastructure to the next level - making it smarter, faster, and more efficient than ever before.

What's new in Halon Protect 15

• AI-powered Code Companion: Write, debug, and deploy policy and config updates faster with context-aware assistance
• OpenMetrics monitoring endpoint: Expose container health and readiness for smarter orchestration and scaling
• Connection prioritization: Fine-tune connection behavior and apply real-time prioritization to traffic

Code Companion: Your AI ally in policy writing

Building secure and performant mailbox infrastructure often involves crafting complex logic. Halon Protect 15 now includes Code Companion, our new AI-based assistant for engineers working with Halon’s scripting language (HSL) and YAML configuration. Integrated into Visual Studio Code, it offers:

• Contextual autocomplete and inline documentation
• Instant error detection and fixes
• Suggestions on best practices and policy guidance

See our manual for tips on getting started with Code Companion with some handy prompts to try out yourself. Whether you're tightening abuse filters or tweaking connection logic, Code Companion makes your workflow smoother and more efficient, helping teams ship faster and safer.

Smarter observability with OpenMetrics

Observability is key to maintaining a healthy mailbox environment. The new OpenMetrics monitoring endpoint allows your orchestrators (like Kubernetes) and load balancers (like HAProxy) to:

• Query container health and readiness
• Understand the inner state of Halon containers in real-time
• Trigger scaling decisions with confidence

Containers can also be manually toggled via API, CLI, or policy, giving your ops team total control.

Connection prioritization: Traffic control at its finest

Halon Protect 15 introduces connection prioritization, a feature that gives you deeper control over how connections are accepted and processed. You can now:

• Assign priorities to connections based on origin, time, or policy
• Implement fairness or weighted logic for high-volume senders
• Ensure critical traffic is never starved by noisy neighbors

It’s a powerful tool for large-service providers to maintain optimal service quality under pressure.

More features you'll appreciate

• XARF support over SMTP: Embrace the industry standard for abuse reporting
• PubSub plugin: Easily connect Halon Protect with Google Cloud Pub/Sub
• Admin dashboard enhancements: Visualize traffic and connection metrics across clusters
• New scripting functions: Now includes UUIDv5 generation and Base64URL encode/decode for tighter logic and interoperability

Time to upgrade!

Already using Halon Protect? You’re just one upgrade away from all this goodness. Thanks to our rolling release process, getting the latest version is both easy and safe.

New to Halon Protect? Discover how we help service providers stay competitive, secure, and future-ready.