Migrating to Halon

Whatever you’re replacing, whether it be your MTA, your inbound filter, or your security stack, migration doesn’t have to mean rebuilding from scratch. Compare Halon with other products in the space, and learn more about what the migration process could look like for you.

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Join the teams already running on Halon

We’ve helped companies around the world migrate from solutions like these

Cloud-based email delivery

SendGrid
Mailgun
Amazon SES
SparkPost by Bird
Postmark
SocketLabs

On-premises email delivery

PowerMTA (opens in a new tab)
Momentum (opens in a new tab)
KumoMTA
GreenArrow
Postfix
Hurricane MTA
Exim
MailerQ

Email security and threat detection

Vade Secure (opens in a new tab)
Cloudmark by Proofpoint
Sophos Email
Fortra Email Security
Cisco ESA
Fortinet FortiMail
SpamExperts
SpamTitan

Comparison guides

Halon has three products, and migration looks different depending on which one you're replacing. Here you'll find a number of guides, organised by product, so you can browse by what you're replacing.

Why teams revisit their email infrastructure and security setup

Every organization is unique, and the reasons why you might choose to migrate your email infrastructure vary from business to business. Here are some of the most common reasons we see:

When the vendor changes hands

When a platform is acquired, roadmap priorities tend to move with it. For a long-term decision, ask what’s committed on roadmap, support and investment, not just what ships today.

Aging infrastructure that’s hard to change

Years of accumulated configuration and specialist knowledge make every change harder to automate, and slower to ship.

Engineering time, not license fees

The real cost is usually the hours spent maintaining tooling around the platform, not the sticker price of the platform itself.

Proving where your data lives

For regulated industries, it’s not enough for data to be secure; teams increasingly have to prove where it lives, too.

Not enough visibility or control

Teams need to see delivery performance, queues and mailbox-provider behavior, and reshape routing, traffic and policy in response. Without both, every incident takes longer to fix.

Security that can’t keep up

Threats evolve, and a filter that misses phishing, blocks legitimate mail, or sits in a patchwork of separate vendors adds risk and overhead.

Migration myths

Switching platforms comes with a few familiar worries. Here’s how they tend to play out.

What we hear

The migration will take too long.

What actually happens

Halon works side-by-side with your team to ensure a smooth and faster transition from your existing platform to Halon.

What we hear

We’ll have to rebuild all our custom logic from scratch.

What actually happens

HSL is built for exactly this kind of work. Routing, filtering and security rules can be defined, tested and deployed in hours rather than weeks.

What we hear

Switching platforms will hurt our deliverability.

What actually happens

Halon gives you more visibility into your deliverability, not less. Delivery Guru classifies bounces automatically to protect sender reputation, and our dynamic queues let you control message flow by source IP, destination, tenant or job.

What we hear

It will cost more than what we pay now.

What actually happens

Halon delivers long-term savings through faster implementation, a 10x reduction in time to resolution for delivery issues, and reduced customer churn.

What we hear

Our team will need to become DevOps experts to run it.

What actually happens

The WebUI and Delivery Insights tools let operations teams solve problems in a browser, without direct server access or DevOps help for configuration changes.

What we hear

Staying on our current platform is the safer choice.

What actually happens

A planned migration now beats a forced one later. Legacy platforms fall further behind modern needs like containers and Policy as Code each year, and open-source, low-cost and cloud alternatives each carry costs of their own.

How Halon reduces migration risk

Migrating email infrastructure takes careful planning. Here's what keeps the risk low.

What carries over

IP reputation follows you

On IPs you control, traffic shifts over in stages, so established pools and warm-up history transfer instead of starting from zero, with deliverability checked at every step.

Routing and policy get ported, not rewritten

Existing delivery rules and tenant policies are mapped into HSL with help from Halon’s own engineers, rather than left for your team to reconstruct alone.

Bounces and feedback loops keep running

Bounce classification, FBL processing, and suppression logic keep running through the switch, so nothing silently stops being tracked mid-migration.

You keep your visibility

Telemetry pipelines stay connected throughout, and Halon’s structured event data typically shows more than what you had, not less.

Security protections stay in place

For inbound and mailbox provider environments, Halon’s integrations with Spamhaus, Sophos, and ClamAV keep multi-layer threat protection running through the switch.

How the move works

Cutover is gradual, not all-or-nothing

Halon runs alongside your existing platform while traffic moves over progressively, rather than forcing one high-risk, big-bang switch.

It fits the infrastructure you already have

Halon runs in public clouds, private infrastructure, or Kubernetes clusters, so the migration doesn’t force a second project to rebuild your environment around it.

Real-time monitoring from the first message

Halon’s toolset gives your team live performance metrics, message history, and quarantine management as soon as traffic starts flowing, so you’re never guessing how the migration is going.

Support along the way

Direct support

Documentation, training and direct access to Halon’s engineers shorten the ramp-up.

Problems get solved faster

If an issue does come up mid-migration, Halon typically cuts time to resolution by 10x, and your operations team can investigate and fix it in a browser without waiting on DevOps.