AdminBolt 1.5.0: See Your Mail Queue, Manage Cloudflare Zones and Choose Which AI Bots Read Your Sites
AdminBolt 1.4.0 was about names and doors: domains in their owners' alphabet and login pages where people already look. 1.5.0 is about visibility and control. Mail stops being a black hole, DNS zones move in and out of the panel as files, Cloudflare becomes something you drive from the panel and your customers decide which AI bots get to read their sites.
Here is what actually changes day to day.
Mail you can finally see
"Did my email go out?" is the classic hosting ticket. Until now, answering it meant a shell session on the server. 1.5.0 puts the answer in the panel, on both sides of the fence.
Admins get a Mail Queue page in the Email group: active, deferred and hold totals at a glance, with filters by sender, recipient and domain. From there you can preview a message, retry or delete it, delete everything matching the current filters or flush the whole queue. When the queue starts to grow, the Email dashboard shows a backlog indicator before your users notice anything.
Clients get a Mail Delivery page for their own domains: recent delivered, deferred and bounced messages with timestamp, sender, recipient, status and the actual deferral or bounce reason. If an alias expanded the message, the original recipient is shown as well. That is one whole category of support tickets your customers can now answer for themselves.
Rounding out the mail work, outbound mail over IPv6 is now an explicit setting (auto, disabled or enabled) and the older IPv6 toggle is relabelled to make clear it covers IMAP and POP3, so each control states exactly what it does.
Zones that travel
DNS zones stop being locked inside the panel. In both the Zone Editor and Global DNS Zones you can export a zone as a standard zone file and import one back. The import is honest about its work: it reports every line it could not apply and why. TTLs outside the panel's allowed range are clamped, with a warning so you know it happened.
DMARC also becomes configurable. DNS settings gain a policy and a report address, used everywhere the panel provisions mail DNS. If you created a _dmarc record by hand, the panel leaves it alone.
And if your domains live behind Cloudflare, the panel now speaks to it directly. Add a domain to your Cloudflare account with the Create zone action and watch the assigned nameservers and zone status right in the list. A per-domain proxy toggle sends web records through Cloudflare's proxy while mail and service hostnames stay DNS only. Cache purge and development mode are one click each.
Your customers pick their AI bots
AI crawlers now read the web at scale. Site owners have opinions about that. As of 1.5.0, your customers can act on those opinions without editing config files: each site gets an allow or block choice for AI bots, by bot type (training, search, assistant) and by owner, with 27 known bots covered including the crawlers run by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Perplexity and ByteDance.
Some of your customers want the traffic and the visibility in AI answers. Others want their content out of training sets. Both groups get a switch instead of a support ticket.
Backups that cover the whole account
The JetBackup Linux integration grows from a home directory copy into a full account backup. Backups and restores now cover hosting accounts, packages, domains with their zones, email accounts, FTP accounts, SSL certificates, databases and database users. Each backup carries a complete panel inventory including cron jobs and DNS records. FTP and mailbox passwords survive a restore intact, so services keep authenticating afterwards. If a JetBackup package upgrade replaces the integration, a health check repairs it on its own.
Smaller things you will notice
A few more items from the changelog that earn their keep:
- Landing page templates: admins and resellers manage templates and assign one per hosting plan, so a freshly provisioned account greets its owner with your page, not a generic one.
- In-place conversion: the migration importer can adopt an existing system user, so an in-place cPanel or DirectAdmin conversion keeps each account's uid, files and passwords.
- Admin and reseller User API: API keys can call client endpoints on behalf of a named account, with reseller keys limited to accounts they own. Useful for automation that acts as the customer without being the customer.
- Custom 404 pages now answer for requests to non-existent
.phpfiles too, not only static ones. - A security pass rounds it out: process listings stay private to each account, home directories use restricted permissions that keep other accounts out, repeated failed panel logins are banned automatically and firewall rules respect the IP family of their source restrictions.
The technical changelog in the panel footer lists every item with its ticket number if you want the full picture.
Upgrading is one click
Upgrades run entirely from the panel. Open the Updates screen in the admin UI, apply 1.5.0 and watch the live progress. This release also makes the updater itself sturdier: a module that fails to upgrade no longer stops the rest, the log ends with a per-module summary and a scheduled update check can no longer interrupt an upgrade already in progress. Take a backup first out of habit and expect only a brief interruption on a typical VPS.
New to AdminBolt? Installation is a single command:
curl -sSL https://get.adminbolt.com/install.sh | bash
Tell us how it goes
That is 1.5.0: a mail queue you can see, zones that travel, Cloudflare on a leash and AI bots on a switch. Tell us how it lands on Discord, the community forum or through the contact form.