First of all, our industry has just celebrated a great anniversary. 2021 was the year that email turned 50 years! The MIT graduate Ray Tomlinson introduced the convention of the ‘@’ symbol to identify a message recipient on a remote computer system. In October 1971, he sent the first email. Today, 50 years later, email remains the most ubiquitous form of communication, and de-facto business communication medium. Email addresses are one of very few widely used, vendor-agnostic, independent addressing schemes, together with phone numbers of physical addresses. We believe that email aligns very well with the principal design of the open internet, and we don’t really see any viable alternatives around the corner. Improving email is at the very heart of everything we do. We’re continuously working hard to make email service providers all over the world more competitive, to avoid unhealthy domination by a few.
It’s also been another year with the pandemic lingering. While we have all been doing our best to enjoy our home offices, meeting each other whenever possible, and being safe, we must highlight how much we miss meeting up with our customers and other people in the email industry. We have been lucky to meet up with a few, but we cannot stress enough how much we’re looking forward to seeing everyone in person again. However, in terms of exchanging great ideas and knowledge within the email space, we’ve been happy to participate in several virtual and hybrid events such as it-sa, Black Hat, Cloud & Cyber Security Expo, Certezza, Inbox Expo, MailCon, Cloudfest, three M3AAWG meetings, and JPAAWG.
We have also had a busy year on the development side, with a focus on supporting DevOps processes, containers, and orchestration. This can improve both speed and reliability for service deployment, especially with larger teams. This effectively makes your email infrastructure more agile. A new plugin architecture that complements Halon script allows us and our customers to employ a greater level of componentization, made convenient through Visual Studio Code extensions and new package repositories. Developing in Halon script can be made more efficient with Docker Desktop templates, and debugging Halon script running within the MTA directly from Visual Studio Code by leveraging its breakpoint interface. Communication between components is designed to work with the dynamic scaling of orchestration tools, and we now provide Docker and Kubernetes templates.
On top of that, we have released a plugin for BIMI verification. It does the heavy lifting for mailbox providers looking to show brand images in their users’ inboxes. We have also compiled Halon MTA for the ARM processor architecture, evaluating performance and feasibility to run on for example AWS Graviton.
When looking back at the year we also need to highlight our growth – and, what a year it has been in terms of welcoming new Halonites to the Halon team! We’re beyond happy to have been welcoming so many new, ambitious and knowledgeable talents. It feels fantastic to be growing and to see just how much we can accomplish together.
These are just some of the things we have been up to in 2021 and we are very happy to call this another successful year. Now, we are beyond excited for the year ahead. It will be an eventful one with lots of things planned. Already now, we have lots of open positions in engineering, marketing, and sales. So, if you are interested in joining a fast-growing tech company, we would love to hear from you.