Spamhaus and Halon partner to secure mailbox providers’ email streams

Secure, efficient email infrastructure

As leaders in email infrastructure software, Halon offers innovative, secure, and flexible solutions. With a mission to empower its users to control and maximize email, threat protection plays a pivotal role. 

Using Halon Protect, mailbox providers are equipped to detect, analyze, and prevent inbound and outbound threats from infecting their network. By applying the appropriate filters and checks at the right time, users can manage and protect their email, keeping costs low and efficiency high.

Powerful email protection, taking minutes to set up

To increase catch rates and enhance email protection, Spamhaus’ real-time DNS blocklists (DNSBLs) are integrated with Halon’s email infrastructure. This prevents over 99% of malicious email from reaching user’s mailboxes – including spam, phishing, malware files, malicious crypto wallets, and more. 

This instantly recovers bandwidth, servers & storage costs typically lost when accepting and processing spam. And with just a few clicks, users are immediately protected, utilizing the continuously updated IP, Domain & Hash data, made available using Spamhaus’ Data Query Service (DQS). With Halon Protect and Spamhaus’ real-time DNS blocklists, users gain robust, reliable, and cost-effective email protection in minutes, with industry-leading false positive rates.

How the integration works

Spamhaus DNSBL’s are integrated with Halon Protect in the mail transfer agent (MTA). To ensure filtering is as efficient as possible, this is a staged process.

The MTA-level blocking works by firstly rejecting email from IP addresses contained in Spamhaus DNSBL’s at the SMTP connection – this eliminates most of the junk messages. When an email is blocked, the sender is notified immediately, ensuring emails are not left in junk folders for weeks without being checked. 

For anything not blocked at the SMTP connection, email content can be filtered by checking against Spamhaus’ domain and hash data. This two-staged approach to email filtering is considered best practice:

1. First, removing the majority of spam sent from known botnets and spammers’ IP addresses before it enters the email stream.
2. Followed by detailed content analysis, to identify emails containing malware files or links to websites controlled by spammers and cybercriminals.

For targeted protection

Halon clients can also provide Spamhaus with SMTP data. Some malicious email campaigns are targeted to a country, industry or indeed a company, so providing this data means users benefit from tailored protection, automatically blocking targeted attackers. This is carried out without any transfer of personally identifiable information (PII) – only IP address, HELO string, and timestamp data are shared.

How to access the email filtering solution

Any Halon Protect client can benefit from this enhanced solution feature. And activation is easy. Sign up for a free 30-day trial with Spamhaus and receive a query key. Enter the query key into Halon’s web interface and get immediate real-time protection in minutes.

For existing Halon clients

Existing Halon Protect clients already benefit from some IP protection from Spamhaus. This drops IP addresses that are observed to be involved in sending spam, snowshoe spamming, bulletproof hosting companies, and hijacked IP space. However, this is far from the full suite of data to provide +99% protection.

To understand more about the additional data available, and how this will further safeguard your email stream, please speak with your Halon representative.  

Keeping your emails safe

Email-based threats are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Users should have the ability to stay protected with ease, without making frequent updates, safe in the knowledge a team is focused on detecting evolving threats on their behalf, 24/7. This is why the Spamhaus/Halon partnership is so important. Users can gain world-class protection, in minutes, with no further work after set up.

As Tara Natanson, Manager of ISP Relations at Constant Contact shares about the data, “There are a lot of blocklists out there but the only one that’s ever been super trustworthy has been Spamhaus.”

Spamhaus are thrilled to be partnered with the Halon team, joining forces to better protect email, and making the internet a safer place. Similarly, Anders Langsved, CEO  at Halon shared: “Halon’s partnership with Spamhaus reinforces our commitment to delivering the most advanced email infrastructure solutions to our clients whilst ensuring that protection is available at every turn. Through our current and future integrations with Spamhaus, we will deliver on our common mission to make the email space a safer place“.

For more information about the integration, see here.

Alternatively, if you’re already using Halon Protect or would like to learn more, you can contact Halon directly.