Halon Protect 16 builds on our goal to simplify day-to-day operations and give teams more precision when managing delivery behavior. This release focuses on making key insights more accessible, streamlining configuration, and improving how policies are applied at scale.

What’s new in Halon Protect 16?

• OpenMetrics support: Halon Protect now exports delivery and filtering metrics in the OpenMetrics format. This means you can stream real time stats into tools like Prometheus and Grafana without needing translation layers or custom exporters.

• Web administration improvements: The user interface now supports autoscaling through shared session storage, displays active DNS resolver activity, and runs long-running actions like message deletion in the background. These changes help teams manage high-volume traffic and complex environments without losing visibility or responsiveness.
  
  
• Bounce normalizer: Halon Protect now includes a new bounce normalizer that groups similar bounce messages and strips out noisy elements like hashes, IPs, and personal data. This helps teams see clearer patterns, reduces the effort needed to create rules, and improves reporting.

• Dynamic policy ordering: Multiple delivery policies can now be evaluated in a specific order: dynamic, backoff, warm-up, and static. This allows different plugins and rule types to work together cleanly and override each other when needed. It makes policy behavior more predictable and reduces edge cases.
  
  
• Per-policy rate algorithm configuration: You can now set rate algorithms per policy, not just globally. This helps tune behavior for warm-up or backoff without affecting other mail streams.
  
  
• Prioritized DNS resolution: Specific recipient domains can now be moved ahead in the DNS resolution queue to avoid delays.
  
  
• Azure linux support: You can now run Halon Protect on Azure Linux. This expands deployment options and simplifies builds for teams already using Microsoft’s cloud.

These and other behind-the-scenes improvements are designed to reduce friction and give email operations teams tighter control over how messages are handled and filtered.

What’s next?

Halon Protect will continue to evolve with easier diagnostics and greater transparency across filtering and delivery stages. We're focused on helping teams reduce configuration overhead and improve reliability without giving up control.

If you’re already using Halon Protect, talk to your account manager to activate the new features. 

If you’re evaluating Halon, and want to see how Halon Protect can simplify and harden your filtering stack, schedule a demo with our team.