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Benjamin Jeffrey - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of IT at M&M Golf Cars
Real User
We can block entire domains and subdomains with a click, and reduced junk mail saves time of every employee
Pros and Cons
  • "They have something called Pattern Filtering, which has been a godsend... For example, if I don't want any email to ever come through that has the term "hot dog" in it, whether it be in the subject, the title, or anywhere else, I can immediately block such emails, company-wide. That has saved me so much time."
  • "If they had a little more documentation explaining how to use regex, or if they could include that inside of the cloud interface so that it generates regex code based on the parameters you input, that would be a lot more useful for people who aren't familiar with coding languages and HTML."

What is our primary use case?

Within our company umbrella, there are three companies under us, with everything from sales to marketing to customer interaction, both inbound and outbound. Anytime that we receive any type of email, it gets filtered through SpamTitan. 

The way that we have it set up is to filter keywords, in addition to its artificial learning capabilities. If something looks like it was written by a human, it will allow it to pass through, unless it throws some kind of flag that something looks suspicious. In general, it simply routes emails to our employees, giving us warnings if there is anything suspicious that we need to know about before those emails actually are received.

We use the cloud version of the solution, we don't have an onsite server. We have multiple companies within my company, but we've set them all up to route through SpamTitan.

How has it helped my organization?

We started with SpamTitan a couple of months after I started with this company. Up until then, we didn't have a spam filter solution. All the junk marketing emails would make it to every single person's inbox. People were having to filter through all the junk while also trying to find and respond to emails from customers in a decent amount of time. They were getting more spam and fake emails with malicious attachments than actual customer emails. The amount of time that everybody was spending just deleting junk and trying to actually find customer emails was excessive.

Since starting with SpamTitan, though, we hardly ever have any emails that were malicious or that were from random domains that are known to be used for spam. Anything that comes through that it thinks is malicious, but it's not 100 percent sure, will be placed in quarantine for each user. It will give them a daily, automatic report saying, "We have these in quarantine. If they look good to you, you can release them, and you'll immediately get them in your inbox."

As a result, we do not have to delete all the spam from our inboxes. It allows us to only see the most important ones that are questionable, so we're not digging through hundreds of emails a day from junk addresses. When compared to before we got SpamTitan three and a half years ago, hours a week are now being saved for every single employee. They no longer have to dig through junk. At the end of 2021, when I ran our yearly report, it automatically blocked over 250,000 bad emails that weren't from customers or had malicious attachments.

If we saved, say, 30 seconds for every one of those 250,000 emails that were stopped, we saved that much time, minimum. Our inboxes don't reach capacity from the junk that should have never reached us to begin with. As a company, we've saved so much money by not having to spend time dealing with that.

The geo-blocking feature definitely reduces our spam intake. The last time that I checked just geo-IP blocking, we had about 12,000 emails that attempted to come through in the last six months and were immediately stopped. They were stopped because we don't do business with them or have any connections with them.

What is most valuable?

The filter rules are valuable. The software itself will automatically filter out things that it thinks are suspicious. However, the filter rules are the most helpful because, if we need to, we can block entire domains and subdomains with the click of a button. In addition, if one specific email address is a problem, but not the entire domain, we can drill down and specifically block it without affecting anyone else in that domain.

They also have something called Pattern Filtering, which has been a godsend. While the software can only do so much, as far as detecting things that look suspicious based on what it's seen from all of its users, with Pattern Filtering I can use my own terminology or search terms. For example, if I don't want any email to ever come through that has the term "hot dog" in it, whether it be in the subject, the title, or anywhere else, I can immediately block such emails, company-wide. That has saved me so much time. It also works for blocking specific document types or file types. All it takes on my end is going into the Pattern Filtering and selecting what I don't want to come through or what I want to go into quarantine, to warn me first before we allow it through. It's one of the most helpful, but also one of the easiest-to-use features, that does the most for our company. It has saved me hours of work a month when it comes to filtering out all the new stuff that keeps coming in from different countries and scammers.

When we started, geo-blocking wasn't a feature but they added it within the last two years. I also do a lot of network security for our company. If there is a specific country that we don't do business with and from which we're getting a lot of requests, or if we have multiple attacks coming in a specific country, or if we keep getting a lot of emails from the same IP subnet from a certain country, instead of having to block every single new IP that comes in from that country, I can literally just block the country and any IP that tries to send us mail is immediately stopped, which is fantastic.

Those features are the ones we use the most, and they're also the most helpful for filtering out the most junk. And a lot of that is done automatically, once it starts detecting our blocking patterns and the stuff we aren't allowing to come through. With the subset of those things that do actually get through, because the senders either found better ways to mask what they're trying to do or they're sending stuff from different IPs that weren't blocked originally, I can just go into the solution and block them. Including login time and getting to the screen, I could have an IP address or an entire country blocked in less than two minutes.

In addition, the UI is not extremely flashy, which is fine for the people who need to be in the online console and determine what gets blocked and what gets released. It's very straightforward without animations or graphics. It has tabs that you click on that say, "If you click here, this is what you're dealing with." The usability is fantastic. It doesn't give me more than I need so I don't have to drill down through 20 different windows before I get to what I want. I actually appreciate the fact that it's as simple as it is.

Another good feature is that you can see how much is being blocked based on date ranges.

What needs improvement?

The only thing that threw me off a little bit, when it first came out, was Pattern Filtering. There didn't seem to be a huge amount of documentation on how to properly use it. If you want to block the term "hot dog," it's pretty straightforward. You just select, "If the email contains this phrase, block it for everyone." 

But, if you want to block an email address with .com.biz, which seems like it's legit but that .biz at the end throws it off, you have to get a little more detailed regarding how you type out what the Pattern Filtering feature looks for. You can't just enter ".com.biz" because it will then block everything that has .com or .biz in it. It takes a little more regex coding.

If they had a little more documentation explaining how to use regex, or if they could include that inside of the cloud interface so that it generates regex code based on the parameters you input, that would be a lot more useful for people who aren't familiar with coding languages and HTML. When you use it for a while, you get used to it, and you understand what it is that the pattern filter is looking for, but a regular user who doesn't know anything about regex has to learn what it is which can be a little daunting for people completely unfamiliar with the concept.

Buyer's Guide
TitanHQ SpamTitan
October 2024
Learn what your peers think about TitanHQ SpamTitan. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: October 2024.
816,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using TitanHQ SpamTitan for three and a half years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I have never once had an issue where the software went down or stopped routing our emails. There has never once been an occasion where TitanHQ has said, "We're going to do maintenance," or "We're not going to be able to route your emails." In two and a half years, it's never stopped working once, not even for five minutes. It's one of the most stable solutions that we use, company-wide.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Scaling is extremely simple. When we started, they asked us how many users we would have. SpamTitan detects whether we are under that number of users. But it has never stopped us. We once went over the number of licensed users. We talked to them and said, "We added new employees, we need to up our license," and they did that instantly. There was no waiting and we didn't have to go through renewing the contract. We didn't have to change any settings and we didn't have to reroute anything again. They added more users and it just kept working. Scaling is super-easy, and the solution can accommodate as many people as you need.

With all of our sub-companies, we have about 150 users of the solution.

We use it literally every day for filtering everything. The cool thing about it is that once it's set up and it's running the way you need it to, you hardly even need to log in, unless somebody tried to send an email and it didn't show up immediately. If that email didn't hit the spam filter, then you just have to tell whoever sent the email to try again. Other than that, it just works.

In the future, if we open more locations or we hire new employees, we'll absolutely increase how many users are using the software because it's invaluable to us.

How are customer service and support?

I come from an MSP background. I took over the director of IT role in this company when I started here. With companies that I used in the past, if there was an issue with something that was not set up right or it was not filtering correctly, you would have to either submit a ticket or call. You would wait on hold and hope that the rep who talks to you is either knowledgeable enough to help you or wait again to be transferred to tier-one, two, or three support, until somebody was able to solve the problem.

The best thing about support with SpamTitan is that if I have an issue and I email them, I will normally get a response in 30 minutes if it's not a serious problem. But if I call them—and I have never had a company do this before—I always seem to talk to the same people; not the team, but literally the same people every time. If I had a problem a couple months ago, and then I have a new problem, I'm talking to the same person that I spoke with months ago, and they're familiar with what's happened in the past and they remember my setup. It seems like the most personalized software support that I've ever experienced. I'm not constantly worried that I'm going to have somebody who isn't able to help me when I call. With TitanHQ, the person I call and talk to is the person that is solving my problem, every single time.

It honestly feels like the people who are helping me either use the software themselves, and have from the beginning, or they helped engineer and develop the software. They're able to fix my problem in minutes, versus several phone calls or having to worry about getting transferred around. That's awesome.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

In a previous job, the company I worked for used Barracuda. That was an onsite spam filtering service. It was fine, although it took a lot more setup and a lot more hands-on work to get it to work the way that I needed it to. If there ever was a problem, either with the hardware or software updates, I would have to call somebody in support who knows what they're doing or wait for somebody to give me a callback and help me fix the problem. In a business, when you have people sending you contracts or sales orders and invoices and there's a problem that is stopping email from coming through, if you can't get help immediately and you lose those emails, it really hurts your company. I had issues like that with Barracuda.

Before Barracuda, we had something that was used to help filter spam and has since become Cisco hardware. It almost feels like the companies were too big to give customers personalized support when they needed it. It was as if they had grown beyond what their support teams could handle. With SpamTitan, I've never once had the feeling that they're taking on more than they can handle.

We looked at Barracuda and Cisco and went through a few demos. Believe it or not, we actually found SpamTitan through Reddit, via several IT channels that I was a member of. Somebody from TitanHQ answered a lot of my questions through Reddit and offered us a demo. We did the demo and it did everything we needed it to do, without a ton of input from us or having to spend days to get it set up and working. The fact that it worked out-of-the-box, meant we went directly from the demo to signing on with the company. We've loved it ever since.

The demo setup that we had tried to do before SpamTitan was insane. We did less to get everything working with SpamTitan than we did with all of these other companies' spam filtering demos. Demos are supposed to be easy and attract customers. You want to show people that your stuff works with the easiest onboarding possible. The only company that was able to do that and show us that their solution worked without a setup headache was SpamTitan. That's why we stuck with them.

How was the initial setup?

It's one of the easiest setups that we've ever done. We just set our mail to route through SpamTitan and it auto-detected our email addresses. That's all it took. The software took care of everything else for us. There was no complicated setup. Our domain goes through the solution first. It detects the users that we have, sets them all up separately, and filters from there. We set up how strict we wanted it to be and let it learn over the first month. We manage everything through their website.

From the time that we were told to change where our mail is routed to, until it was actually successfully routing our emails to SpamTitan, it took about five minutes to set up.

Because we were unfamiliar with the software, we waited until our company was closed, and we weren't expecting any emails, to implement it. We did it on a weekend when we don't get a lot of customer emails. I spoke with somebody from SpamTitan and they told me where I needed to change our routing to. We logged into our domain, changed our MX record to route to SpamTitan, and everything else just took care of itself after that.

When we first started, there was a test mode and it would ask me, as the administrator, what was okay to let through. It would learn, based on my preferences, what it is that we were looking to block. After that first month of using SpamTitan, we now get a maximum of three false positives, company-wide, a week. Most of the time, the ones that get caught in the quarantine but that should have come through have a PDF attached or something has a really sketchy name, like a bunch of numbers, or it has "exe", even if it's not a .exe file but has the word "executive". But it lets us know that it was flagged so that way we have the ability to release it.

What was our ROI?

Not having to completely recover the company from a malware attack or from something that came in through email, and not having to worry about employees clicking on malicious links, are themselves, aspects of a return on investment. One malicious email with a bad attachment, or with a link that leads to a bad attachment, is enough to take an entire network down. 

Also, the fact that our firewall hasn't been working as hard since we got the spam filter, speaks for itself regarding how valuable the software is. 

If one software implementation can stop 90 percent of the problems in a company, when it comes to malware and malicious actors; if it can do that much and take the workload off of everything else in the company, then it's worth it a million times over.

And the time that we all save not having to dig through all the junk or worrying about whether we are going to click on something we shouldn't click on allows all of us to focus more on our actual tasks. We don't have to devote so much of our day to digging through and deleting junk emails, just to get to the stuff we actually need to do our jobs. That is also return on our investment. The amount of time SpamTitan has saved us is definitely worth it.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

When we started with this company they had fewer features. Neither the geo-IP blocking was available, nor was the Pattern Blocking. But throughout the three and a half years that we've been with them, they've added them, and they have not increased our cost. They've not even asked us to sign on for additional features. They just added them to their product and they were available for us to use. Having the same costs that we've been paying and having new features added is awesome. They give you an update without charging you more for it. I like that a lot. It makes you feel appreciated as a customer.

What other advice do I have?

If you're considering SpamTitan, get a feel for the software during the demo that they offer. If there is anything that you're not 100 percent certain about in terms of how it works or what its function is, call the support people and they'll explain it to you and make sure that you understand what it's supposed to do and how it works. That will let you know that the support people are there to help you, but it also makes sure that you understand the software that you're considering paying for. The demo will show you how much their software is actually able to do, while asking questions of their support staff will also show you how attentive and personal the support is. That way, you're getting the most out of determining if you want to actually use the software.

Lean on the support staff, because that's what they're there for. They will let you know that if you need anything, they're always there to help, no matter how small or big the question or problem might be.

The biggest lesson I've learned from using the solution is that I should have gotten it a lot sooner. The sooner you use the solution, the more time you'll have for everything else in your company.

Given all the spam filters that I've used, this is by far the easiest to use and the most detailed. At least give it a try, before you make a decision.

Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
Paul Rubera - PeerSpot reviewer
President at Powerhouse Systems MSP & MSSP
Reseller
Geo-blocking helps create a solid "front door" of protection, and the solution saves time for IT
Pros and Cons
  • "The key differentiators of the product for an MSP are its ease of use and effectiveness. It generates reports and makes things easy for IT to manage. It's a set-it-and-forget-it type of solution."
  • "With the geo-blocking tool, it would be nice if it listed checkboxes for all the countries and had one overall checkbox for the whole area. Right now, you have to start typing them all in, or half type them, to get the list. That's time-consuming and is one thing I don't like."

What is our primary use case?

We utilize the solution to send all our email to their cloud to filter it.

How has it helped my organization?

The biggest benefit of being a partner of TitanHQ is being able to offer their products across the board, whether the client is a small company with five people, or a growing or midsize company, and it even works for some large companies. WebTitan even comes with an on-prem DNS proxy, so you can also proxy all your information. You can also dictate who has access, who gets filtered, and who doesn't get filtered. For us, it's quite easy to sell it because it's not overly complicated and it doesn't require lots of modules.

With SpamTitan there are large savings for IT because they are not bombarded with phishing emails and thousands of spam emails, bad URLs, and bad domain names. The filtering technology helps safeguard their environment and, by the same token, it actually frees up time for folks to do some work that is native to their environment and not waste time.

It helps employees save time, as well, because they're getting the emails that they expect. It could be saving them 90 minutes a day, on average, and maybe more, if people have some training. If we're talking about IT folks who earn in the range of $90,000 to well over $100,000, 90 minutes times 10 guys could be over $1,000 a day in savings. It adds up fast.

If you're dealing with email threats, users will not use their email if they think they have been attacked, so they won't be working. The IT guys that handle tickets are then tied up and have to manage the tickets. A ticket goes up the chain to the correct group and they have to analyze it and decide whether it's something they can do or if it goes further up. If they can't handle it, it's going to go up to cyber security. We're talking about four or five people that have touched it, each spending 10 or 15 minutes. Multiply that by X dollars and it adds up. They have to get in touch with the user, check the unit, and they might have to take that person offline. And maybe the person who makes a lot of money a year is tied up for an hour. Before you know it, you're $1,500 in the hole, just for one phishing email, because you don't want it spreading, and you don't want the person on the network. It's a snowball effect. One wrong click and you could be in trouble really fast.

What is most valuable?

The system analyzes and catalogs what's good and what's bad. The cool thing about SpamTitan is that it saves a report on what it did not allow to hit your inbox. You can then easily block those domains, which is helpful because people will use different names before the "@" symbol in an email address. By blocking the whole domain, no matter what they do, they can't send you any email via that domain. 

It's pretty straightforward and pretty easy to use. It's mostly automated and that makes it easy for an IT department to keep tabs on it.

The key differentiators of the product for an MSP are its ease of use and effectiveness. It generates reports and makes things easy for IT to manage. It's a set-it-and-forget-it type of solution. It gives you one pane of glass. There are two different cloud URLs but you just create a shortcut on your desktop and IT people can jump in and out of it in seconds.

We also use the geo-blocking feature a lot for clients that don't have interests outside the US. If they receive stuff from overseas where they don't have a relationship, we can turn off that flow. In the future, if they start working with, say, a Chinese company, it can be turned back on. It makes it convenient for dictating how an organization deals with the outside world on an everyday basis. As soon as we turn it on, we notice a massive increase in protection, in terms of the number of emails being caught.

We can watch the results almost in real time. It has a pretty consistent synchronization with email clients, whether it's O365 or a web-type email. You can still dictate what comes in. If you don't like Gmail accounts or random Yahoo account emails, you can filter them out. Bad people use any trick they can get their hands on, including fake company names that have one extra letter. Or they will say an email is from the president, or it is an alert. They use scare tactics to get you to open and click on things.

The geo-blocking ability is really important because a lot of outside threats are coming from other governments. There's a lot going on, like espionage, hacking, and the stealing of data and trade secrets. Companies are ruthless, so it's a free-for-all on the web if you don't have a solid front door for protection and your walls are made out of "paper." You need steel walls now and multiple layers just to keep things at bay.

SpamTitan's internal technology definitely does a great job analyzing where something is coming from and analyzing the technical side of the data. If something was redirected, it can detect the origin and track down where the server it came from is. Even if the IP range changes, it can let you know where the origin was. It's pretty good at doing its job.

In terms of geo-blocking exceptions, I have bought products from the UK, and their updates and download packages all come from outside the US. I can instruct it so that the UK, specifically, is open. I can also allow just that particular UK domain and if I see unwanted UK addresses, I can add them to the blocked domain-name section. That way, I can have something open and still block others at the same time.

What needs improvement?

With the geo-blocking tool, it would be nice if it listed checkboxes for all the countries and had one overall checkbox for the whole area. Right now, you have to start typing them all in, or half type them, to get the list. That's time-consuming and is one thing I don't like.

Also, it would be nice to know when the DNS proxy version needs to be updated. They should send out the customer's version number, and why it needs to be upgraded, a month or two before it's necessary. That would be helpful so we don't find ourselves wondering why the DNS proxy we have right now just randomly stopped updating, when it's because a new version came out.

Their room for improvement is minuscule. It's more end-user or IT types of fixes, rather than functionality. The functionality is great. It's just that the ease of use could be improved for someone who didn't know you have to type things in. It should be easier for a junior IT guy to get in there without having to say, "How do I do this?"

For how long have I used the solution?

We've been using SpamTitan for about four years. We are an MSP and SSP, which means we're on the security side, and we are a TitanHQ partner.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability is awesome. They have a very high 99.9 percent uptime.

A lot of companies that offer cloud services definitely go out of their way to have that high percentage of uptime. If your email goes down, you're not able to talk to anybody. It has to have a high rate of uptime. It's comparable to other solutions.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

This is the most accurate threat detection and content filtering tool on the market today. It has flexible deployment options, including roaming clients for all operating systems, and Active Directory integration. It has features to fit your organization, whether you're fully remote, hybrid, or back in the office.

How are customer service and support?

Their tech support is great. If I have a question or it stops working, they're really quick. I can open a ticket and work with a technician and they're pretty good at helping resolve issues. They're very effective. And they go out of their way to meet with folks and give you the support that you're looking for.

Compared to some of their competitors, they're quick. You don't have to wait three or four days for someone to pick up a ticket. Other solutions can be a little slower, in my experience. The level of expertise from TitanHQ's support is right up there. The engineers or the people that deal with the product every day know the product like the back side of their hand.

With every problem I've had, they've knocked it out of the park.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We were using DNS filtering, but we soon realized we needed more security.

How was the initial setup?

WebTitan Cloud is a cloud-based web filtering solution that allows you to monitor, control, and protect your users and business when online. It requires no on-premise software or end-user client software, and the setup of the cloud filter is extraordinarily simple and quick.

What about the implementation team?

They have very detailed support page with easy-to-follow guides and if you get stuck you can request support. We did ours in-house and was pretty straight forward to roll out. The support team is Top Notch!!! 

What was our ROI?

The ROI is low because it is a hosted solution and the technology is on the backend. This saves us a ton of time each month.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Block Malware, Ransomware, and Phishing Advanced DNS Web Security and Content Filtering Software. WebTitan helps control the web content your staff accesses and protects your business from online threats with powerful DNS filtering. The setup and low cost are a huge plus!

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We picked SpamTitan over other solutions. I like its usability, affordability, and ease of maintenance. It's constantly being tweaked behind the scenes. There are small things that happen under the covers that we don't see, but they're definitely wise to what's going on out there. There aren't many cons to the solution.

Just because they're not extremely expensive doesn't mean they don't work. You don't have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on something, just to get it to work. TitanHQ does a great job with the product. They do a lot of advanced DNS scoping and a lot of preventive work against phishing and malware. They definitely protect their users quite effectively. And they have a 14-day trial so you can try it out.

What other advice do I have?

As an MSP, there are aspects of the product's technology that helps us acquire new customers and add value. First, it's pretty straightforward and easy to roll out and add to someone's layers of security, which makes it an easy and affordable solution. Also, it's not extremely expensive. Other solutions get really pricey, really fast. In addition, WebTitan and SpamTitan work hand in hand. I recommend getting both. It also has a dashboard for both so you can see what's coming in and what's getting blocked, what the URL was, and it even divides it up by categories with overall percentages. That way, if you want to tweak the way people surf the net, you can certainly do that.

The bad guys (Bad Actors) have lots of money and lots of bad helpers. They probably have more resources than you do. They're trying to get in and you're trying to block them. It's cops and robbers. But with the right tools, you can make your good guys' house really strong and defeat most of the bad guys. Obviously, they don't want to get caught, so the more they hang around or try to get into something, the more likely it is that something is going to track them. If there's enough tracking, you can find out their IP, because everybody has one assigned and it goes all the way down to their username and address. Unfortunately, there are super-smart ones and you'll never see them coming. There's just nothing you can do about that unless you have a locked-down local environment with no outside access, and some places do that.

Small and medium companies, with the growth of hacking and malware, can be prime targets for attacks. There are studies that show that half of SMBs have suffered cyber-attacks. They need security that works for them to keep them safe from constant attacks. I would highly recommend SpamTitan, and I have been in the industry for 35 years. It's very effective and very easy to use.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Hybrid Cloud
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor. The reviewer's company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: MSP, MSSP
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
TitanHQ SpamTitan
October 2024
Learn what your peers think about TitanHQ SpamTitan. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: October 2024.
816,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Rick Shepard - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at RCI Systems
Real User
Users can customize the emails they get and the emails they block, saving me time
Pros and Cons
  • "It gives our users the chance to interact with the program. They can decide if there are things that are junk mail that they don't want to be messing with, on an individual basis. Of course, I can always override that or control it from a company standpoint."

    What is our primary use case?

    We use it for spam filtering.

    How has it helped my organization?

    The fact that you're able to customize the program on an individual basis has been very helpful. That means I don't have to get involved with blocking certain things unless they are a common denominator among all our employees. If something keeps showing up, I'll get several requests to block it company-wide. Otherwise, the users can get in there and do their own thing and I don't have to worry about it.

    It has definitely saved employees' time by not having to sort through junk and spam emails. We've turned it off a few times because we were having some issues or we had to change our mail server and, all of a sudden, people would say, "I got 50 spam messages." SpamTitan is definitely doing its job. It is probably 20 to 25 percent more effective than our previous solution.

    SpamTitan is catching a little more than SonicWall did. It's about 10 to 15 percent more effective in that aspect. And the fact that it's a little more customizable has certainly made it a better solution.

    It has also reduced our false positive rate by that same 10 to 15 percent. Nothing is perfect. You're always going to have a few that get through or that get blocked when you don't want them blocked. You just have to watch it and teach it. The longer we've been using it, the more refined we've been able to get it.

    What is most valuable?

    It gives our users the chance to interact with the program. They can decide if there are things that are junk mail that they don't want to be messing with, on an individual basis. Of course, I can always override that or control it from a company standpoint.

    We use the geo-blocking feature to block a few countries, but for the most part, we leave most of them open. We deal with manufacturers that have office locations and factories in many countries, including Russia and China. But we'll block something like Afghanistan because we're not getting any business from Afghanistan. The geo-blocking may not have reduced our spam significantly, but it does block some.

    For how long have I used the solution?

    I've been using TitanHQ SpamTitan for just about a year.

    What do I think about the stability of the solution?

    It's extremely stable. We've never had a failure such as their servers going down or anything like that.

    What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

    It's probably very scalable for a larger company. I really only know it from our small company standpoint, but it would appear that it would work for a company of tens of thousands.

    How are customer service and support?

    We changed to a new mail server and we had some issues getting SpamTitan working on the new one, from a traffic standpoint, IP-wise. It wound up being a port that we needed to open up that wasn't open. I went back and forth a couple of times before we finally figured out what the problem was, but once it was fixed it worked fine.

    The engineer I was working with was obviously very knowledgeable and thorough, but he was probably used to dealing with IT people who deal with this stuff a lot more frequently and spend a lot more time with it than I do. Sometimes, they need to dumb it down a little bit and talk to their audience. They shouldn't assume that everyone is a subject matter expert.

    My experience with SonicWall's support was pretty similar, although I've had fewer problems to deal with using SpamTitan than I did with SonicWall.

    How would you rate customer service and support?

    Positive

    Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

    We were having problems with spam. We were using SonicWall and they had issues with a release that they brought out last summer. It wouldn't work with our server and software combination. They tried and tried and then I got tired of waiting for them to fix it. I went hunting, came across SpamTitan, and it seemed like a good fit. We've been using it since then.

    With SpamTitan, our users have more access to their spam email than they were used to. We were limited with SonicWall. If you didn't get to your spam within three days, it was gone and you couldn't figure out what you missed. If you were on vacation, sometimes that would be a problem. SpamTitan doesn't have that problem as it can store stuff for a longer period of time. I believe it holds emails for 30 days. I can change that as an administrator, but I also have to be aware of the amount of junk mail that people get. Spam can really fill up a server pretty quickly, so you don't want to keep it around too long.

    A frequent problem with SonicWall, because of that three-day limit, was that once a user had passed that, I had to get involved. If a customer wrote to one of our employees saying, "Hey, did you get my email?" I'd have to go find it. I don't have that same problem anymore. It has been greatly reduced.

    In terms of the amount of time required to sort through unwanted junk and spam emails, SonicWall and SpamTitan are similar. You still have to go through your email and see which ones are junk. SpamTitan might be a little quicker because of how often it reports back.

    SpamTitan is also an improvement over the SonicWall solution from a filtering standpoint. It is a win-win. In some ways, it was nice SonicWall did fail because we have a better solution now.

    How was the initial setup?

    We had to disable the SonicWall version, which wasn't hard to do. Then we had to insert SpamTitan into the picture. It took a little bit of time, but not that much. It isn't something I do every day. I'm not an IT guy who deals with that on a regular basis.

    It was pretty much straightforward, with a couple of minor issues. We couldn't get it to work and it turns out we had some bad IP numbers. They had given us an older version from the demo and they said, "Oh, we should have given you new ones when you bought the product." That was a minor glitch. Their support was good over the phone and they got me pointed in the right direction and it's been working since.

    We discussed hosting SpamTitan in-house, because we had SonicWall in-house, but in this case the cloud solution seemed to be a better fit for us.

    It requires very little maintenance. In the early stages it was more because we were refining the program and what it was filtering and not filtering. Now, there are probably weeks that I don't even look at it. There are times when I'll get a comment from one of our users who says, "Hey, can you do this?" or "I'm having a problem," and I might look at it then. But if I spend 15 minutes on it in a week, that's a lot of time, at this point.

    What was our ROI?

    We do see a return on our investment. It's not a lot of money, but we do get some return because people aren't wasting their time with junk mail and I'm not wasting my time trying to filter out more things because users are able to do that on their own.

    What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

    One user is the same price as 50 users and there isn't a discount until you get to about 500 users. From a small business point of view—we're 30 people—there should be a price break before you have 500 people. Small businesses don't have a lot of money.

    Which other solutions did I evaluate?

    I looked around on the internet. There wasn't a particular solution I was looking at. I read a review about SpamTitan and that's the one I remembered. I liked what I read, it seemed pretty straightforward, and that's what we went with.

    I looked at Proofpoint and a few other things, but a lot of them are designed for companies that are very large or at least medium sized. We're a small company and I wasn't going to spend tens of thousands of dollars. We don't have that in our budget for spam filtering, and SpamTitan was a lot more affordable.

    What other advice do I have?

    We really haven't been looking at anything else, because we've been happy with the product. I like it and we're up for renewal and we will be renewing it. You're not going to renew it if you don't like it.

    Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
    PeerSpot user
    Bornwell Mwenya - PeerSpot reviewer
    Head of Technical Support at ZAMNET
    MSP
    Filters inbound and outbound emails for security breaches
    Pros and Cons
    • "It provides security for the communication between the sender and receiver. It does the encryption perfectly. We ensure that emails are sent without any security breaches. The spam catch rate at the moment is almost 100%."
    • "We would like to improve the number of quarantine reports received per day. At the moment, only one is received within 24 hours. So, there are a number of complaints that we get from customers who want to improve the reporting of the quarantined emails since they only get one copy per day. This means they may not receive other emails that have been received after they get the report. So, we would like SpamTitan to improve on the frequency of the quarantine report."

    What is our primary use case?

    We use it for filtering emails, inbound and outbound, as well as have it act as a smart host for our external clients. Being an MSP, we primarily use it for filtering emails on behalf of the clients as well as filtering the content that they send and receive using the SpamTitan platform.

    It is our primary filtering system. We use it to filter emails on behalf of organizations who have their own email system platforms, like Office 365. In terms of extensiveness, we use it 100%. 

    How has it helped my organization?

    We have big organizations within our country who use the SpamTitan service as their primary security system for their intelligent communication with their clients, within the country and outside the country.

    It provides security for the communication between the sender and receiver. It does the encryption perfectly. We ensure that emails are sent without any security breaches. The spam catch rate at the moment is almost 100%.

    The solution has helped reduce spam rates overall by 75%. It has helped us to reduce the number of attacks that we used to have. It has helped to reduce the number of complaints we've been getting from customers in terms of them receiving a lot of spam and unsolicited emails coming from the outside.

    What is most valuable?

    • The quarantine feature
    • The reporting feature
    • The content filtering feature

    With the reporting feature, we were able to have broader insight on emails that our clients send as well as the emails that get to our clients. We are able to analyze when we get complaints from clients as to what happened to the emails that they sent to their clients, who sent it at what time, and the content in cases of complaints where the client did not get an email from the sender or their emails were not delivered to their sender. We are able to view at what point did the email drop, who sent the email, and to whom.

    We use the geo-blocking feature based on IP addresses. We also use it based on the country and the top-level domain. We are able to block any of those three. For example, we get a lot of emails from Japan. Therefore, we have blocked the top-level domain .jp at the end.

    What needs improvement?

    The interface is not so user-friendly at the moment. We did attend training a few months ago on their new interface. They have a new GUI that is quite user-friendly and easy to navigate.

    We would like to improve the number of quarantine reports received per day. At the moment, only one is received within 24 hours. So, there are a number of complaints that we get from customers who want to improve the reporting of the quarantined emails since they only get one copy per day. This means they may not receive other emails that have been received after they get the report. So, we would like SpamTitan to improve on the frequency of the quarantine report.

    For how long have I used the solution?

    I have been using it for three years.

    What do I think about the stability of the solution?

    Stability is at 99%. We rarely have outages. We rarely contact their support team because their service is running smoothly at the moment.

    What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

    The solution is scalable. If you contact them for an upgrade or add-ons on your current SpamTitan product, they are very much available to help. The service change is almost instant. Within 24 hours, you are able to upgrade from one package to another, and add-ons are done instantly.

    In terms of upgrades, we are considering upgrading from our current license, which accommodates 2,000 emails. We want to upgrade to 4,000 emails. They have been very helpful on how we can implement the upgrade.

    How are customer service and support?

    Their support is very helpful. We get the feedback that we want on time. There is a feature of their ticketing system that is perfect and easy to track the conversation as well as the history. You can download the chats that you have had with them for future reference.

    I have interacted with other vendors or suppliers of almost the same feature. I can say that SpamTitan's support expertise is very good because they know what we go through and help. They have solutions at hand. If you ask them, they can help and direct you to the solution that you need. 

    How would you rate customer service and support?

    Positive

    Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

    SpamTitan’s geo-blocking feature helps allow us to block spam emails entering our network and servers, reducing our spam intake. Our former solution was only able to handle outbound traffic. That meant that we did not have control over what was coming through our network. For example, we used to get spam emails with unknown usernames, so our customers were getting a lot more spam emails than the important emails that they should expect. 

    At the time that we acquired the product, we had another product called Proxmox. As we were implementing, we tested it for about four days. After that time, we did not have any issues in terms of complaints from clients because it was smooth. While the other product was running, we brought in SpamTitan. As a strategy, from my end, it was perfectly done.

    The previous solution was not user-friendly. It would only filter one way or direction. This meant we needed to buy from them twice, i.e., the same product, for inbound and outbound. Since our budget was constrained, we looked at SpamTitan, and its pricing was perfect. It was easy to deploy and user-friendly.

    With the deployment of SpamTitan, we are now able to catch those unnecessary emails coming into our network, which we are able to block. There is a feature, which we have enabled, to verify the usernames that we host, meaning those that we don't host are blocked before they reach our customers or our network.

    Before Proxmox and SpamTitan, we were using Barracuda Central. but acquiring the hardware as well as the renewal of Energize per year, that meant going beyond our budget. So, we approached SpamTitan. We noticed that the hardware was cost effective. We could subscribe per quarter, biannually, or annually. That flexibility meant that we had to quickly jump to SpamTitan for those advantages.

    How was the initial setup?

    It was easy because we did the hosting for the configurations on our end with their help. It was done within a day. It took about five hours to complete the configurations, then have emails in and out through the SpamTitan product.

    What was our ROI?

    Within the first three years, we were able to see that this product has been perfect for our business. We have acquired more clients using this platform, unlike with our previous platform.

    The collaboration between TitanHQ and us is 95% in terms of positioning us to acquire new business. Titan products manage both inbound and outbound at the lowest cost. All the requirements that we need for this solution are covered. Also, the support is perfect. We don't have any problems with it.

    In the last three years, we have acquired or managed to grow the customer base on email services because we get a lot of referrals. Because we have the geo-blocking feature, which quarantines emails, it sends a report to our clients before they accept the email. This means they get to know about SpamTitan. A number of them call us about the solution before we reach out to them and sell the service.

    What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

    They have different packages, services, or products that they sell. I would recommend it for small businesses to larger organizations, even enterprises, but not individuals. 

    There is the flexibility to ask them what you want, then they will advise a package that suits your business.

    Which other solutions did I evaluate?

    SpamTitan's key differentiators are the pricing, system, and service that we get. They are very different from other systems that we have used or partnered with from Titan.

    What other advice do I have?

    Before jumping into using the product, I would advise that you research other products as SpamTitan's features are mostly required for businesses at the moment.

    I would rate the solution as 10 out of 10.

    Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

    On-premises
    Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor. The reviewer's company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: MSP
    PeerSpot user
    Anil Melwani - PeerSpot reviewer
    IT Director at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
    Real User
    Provides the ability for users to manage their own allow and block lists
    Pros and Cons
    • "The overall intuitiveness is really good. We have been able to run reports, set up quarantine emails, and integrate with our Exchange server. That has all been extremely straightforward."
    • "The only improvement that comes to mind is updates. We are technically on TitanHQ's private cloud. We are responsible for updating our platform when a new version comes out. I would personally prefer to have SpamTitan just notify me, and say, "At this specific time on this specific day, we will be upgrading you to the newest platform.""

    What is our primary use case?

    It takes the load off of our server. It also takes the load off of our Internet connection, since we are not bringing in a whole bunch of spam emails unnecessarily that need to be filtered out. 

    We partnered with TitanHQ SpamTitan platform so all incoming emails go through their servers first before they reach our network. It takes out, on average, 75% to 80% of the emails that would normally be received as junk. Those are filtered out and we keep what is important to us.

    How has it helped my organization?

    Over the years that we've been using it, people have gotten the confidence that the messages that they get are legitimate. Also, they glance at the stuff that ends up in their quarantine, but they don't necessarily worry about it. So, it has overall increased employee comfort and productivity.

    For some of our power users, I would regularly have them sending us help desk tickets that said, "This is spam. This is spam. This is spam." That has probably been cut down by 50% 60% for those specific power users. For those who heavily rely on email, there has been probably a 50% to 60% time savings.

    SpamTitan has helped improve our spam catch rate and reduce our false positive rate.

    What is most valuable?

    The ability for users to manage their own allow and block lists is its most valuable feature. Daily, at 3:00 AM, we have configured it so users will get a quarantine email that shows all their messages that were blocked from the day before. They can go in and release the messages themselves or they can block them if they don't ever want to see them again. They can allow them permanently, if it is a valid email that they should be receiving on a regular basis. Therefore, it really gives the end users the power to do their own thing and reduces the number of help desk tickets that my team needs to respond to.

    We just implemented SpamTitan’s geo-blocking feature in the last couple of months. It has been great. We have only seen one false positive and that was a company that we partnered with in California. Their messages got blocked because their server was in Germany. Germany was one of the countries we happen to block with geo-blocking. They were like, "Oh, that is really bizarre because all of our stuff is here in California." Turns out that their hosted email that they were using was going through a failover test or something like that. So, they were rerouting their servers through Germany at that particular time. It definitely did what it was supposed to do.

    We used the geo-blocking feature to restrict emails from specific destinations with a Google search. We went through some of the security forums and platforms out there and looked at the top 10 countries that cybersecurity professionals recommend blocking. We then added those to our geo-blocking list.

    Primarily, we are a California-based company and don't really do business with companies outside of the United States. So, the geo-blocking feature is just an extra layer of security and extra piece of mind. Therefore, if any spam out there is trying to purport that it is coming from the United States, but really isn't, then we would not let those messages through.

    Since we turned on the geo-blocking feature, we have definitely seen a reduction in spam. I don't sift through the thousands of messages a day that I see in the dashboard to see which ones were blocked by geoblocking. I am sure there are filters and things like that, but I don't necessarily get the time to deep dive into it like that. 

    The user interface is really straightforward. I haven't had any issues with it whatsoever.

    The overall intuitiveness is really good. We have been able to run reports, set up quarantine emails, and integrate with our Exchange server. That has all been extremely straightforward. 

    What needs improvement?

    The only improvement that comes to mind is updates. We are technically on TitanHQ's private cloud. We are responsible for updating our platform when a new version comes out. I would personally prefer to have SpamTitan just notify me, and say, "At this specific time on this specific day, we will be upgrading you to the newest platform."

    For how long have I used the solution?

    I have been using it since October 2020.

    What do I think about the stability of the solution?

    The stability has been rock-solid. 

    SpamTitan has vastly superior stability versus the previous email security solutions that we have used. Not only were we getting a lot of false positives that was really frustrating, but there was a particular day when SolarWinds was having some sort of network issue. Mail was delayed by six to eight hours coming through the network. There is just no way, as an organization, we can function like that. So, we had to get off that platform.

    What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

    The scalability has been fantastic. We grow on average four to five percent year-on-year. In the two and a half years that we have been using it, we have not needed to worry about its performance.

    It is being used extensively. There are several clinics that we manage who are also being filtered as well as us. I know of at least one other clinic that will be coming onboard shortly, and we will roll them into SpamTitan as well. I don't see us having any issues with having additional growth.

    How are customer service and support?

    Whenever I have had questions and needed to reach out to support, there has always been a very quick turnaround. They have access to our dashboard so they can see what we are looking at and help guide us through where we need to go and what we need to do.

    The technical support has been fantastic. Whenever we have had issues, I typically just open a support ticket. They are very responsive. Typically, within four hours, I will have an answer to my question. I would give them a solid nine out of 10. There is always room for improvement.

    For our previous solution from SolarWinds, I would probably have given them about four or five out of 10. This is compared to the support that I get with TitanHQ, which is much better.

    I know that they are changing their method. Instead of just by email, we now go in through an actual web portal to create a ticket. 

    How would you rate customer service and support?

    Positive

    Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

    We have used a couple of different spam filtering systems in the past. We have an on-premise Exchange server, therefore all of our email is housed within our network. We wanted to find a robust solution that would filter spam before it reached our network.

    Previously, we were using Mail Assure by SolarWinds. Prior to that, we were using a solution called Online Spam Solutions, which was just a small locally run company. The performance on Online Spam Solutions was not as good as it used to be. We were losing mail and getting a lot more false positives than we should have. Then, we did some research. We were already using SolarWinds for another product, so we decided to give them a try. Their sales pitch was vastly superior to what the actual product was. We were only with them for about two years, then we found SpamTitan and have been really happy ever since.

    How was the initial setup?

    It was pretty straightforward. I had a little bit of an issue with the LDAP configuration, which was an issue on WebTitan as well. It was more important for us to have it working for SpamTitan. Working with support, the issue was pretty straightforward and we got it ironed out in a matter of days. From initially creating the platform to where we had it fully configured, it took about two weeks.

    Email is so mission-critical. We did not want to have any downtime or a period where we were really going through a lot of fine-tuning. One of the nice things about SpamTitan was the default settings that came with the platform were very good. It was already doing a better job than what we came from. So, the fine tuning period was a lot shorter than I anticipated it was going to be based on previous solutions.

    What about the implementation team?

    We had TitanHQ help us with anything that we needed.

    What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

    It is very good. We actually ended up saving money from our previous solution.

    Which other solutions did I evaluate?

    We did evaluate some other companies. I participate in an organization called Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society (HIMSS). I reached out to some of my peers there and asked them what they were using. Quite a few of them came back and said that they were using SpamTitan from TitanHQ. So, we gave them a full evaluation and decided to use them.

    What other advice do I have?

    Definitely go for it. It will make your end users feel a lot happier because they can manage their own quarantines, allow lists, and block lists. At the same time, knowing that you have your own private cloud that you can manage yourself makes it a great solution for those who want to have full administrative access to their own system.

    I would give the solution a solid nine out of 10. I would almost give it a 10. Frankly, it has been an extremely good solution for us as an organization. However, I am not normally one to give a score of 10. There is always some sort of room for improvement, but this solution is a high nine in my opinion.

    Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

    Private Cloud

    If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

    Other
    Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
    PeerSpot user
    Ricky Brewster - PeerSpot reviewer
    Heldesk & Internal Systems Manager at Active IT Systems
    Real User
    Allows us to change every setting, down to the fine details, and significantly improved our spam catch rate
    Pros and Cons
    • "The key differentiator of TitanHQ for its partners is the Sandboxing Service. The email filtering will open up any attachments and run them through two antivirus sandboxes before they reach you. You can pretty much guarantee there's not going to be a virus in them. I've not seen anyone else do that."
    • "The SpamTitan user interface is not amazing, but I don't mind it. I know they are releasing a new one soon. I have seen it and it looks a lot better. That has been an area that needs improvement."

    What is our primary use case?

    We use SpamTitan, in our role as an MSP, for all of our customers across the board. We set them up on SpamTitan to protect their emails, inbound and outbound. It will scan everything for spam, junk, viruses, dodgy attachments, and spoofing.

    It's on the cloud. We have SpamTitan Private Cloud with two dedicated servers that live on Amazon AWS and they are only used by us.

    How has it helped my organization?

    The collaboration between us, as an MSP, and TitanHQ in terms of positioning us to acquire new business, is spot-on. I have meetings with our account manager every quarter to go through what's happening with TitanHQ and learn about new products that they're offering. They will also ask how we're doing and whether we have anything big coming up, to see what they can do to support us through it.

    Their partner program is excellent when it comes to partner profitability. TitanHQ is phenomenal.

    The solution has also helped to improve our spam catch rate and reduce our false positive rate, by at least 50 percent.

    In addition, it helps save employees' time by not having to sort through junk and spam email. It just works. With SpamTitan we set it up and that was it. We left it to it to do its job and it does it. It's saving us at least four or five hours a week.

    What is most valuable?

    The aspects of TitanHQ's technology that help us acquire new customers and add value to our services are its ease of use and functionality. It's a brilliant product. It sounds amazing when you first look at it, and it does what it says it will do.

    The key differentiator of TitanHQ for its partners is the Sandboxing Service. The email filtering will open up any attachments and run them through two antivirus sandboxes before they reach you. You can pretty much guarantee there's not going to be a virus in them. I've not seen anyone else do that.

    Also, the solution's overall intuitiveness is fantastic. Everything, from our experience dealing with the people at TitanHQ, to setting the product up, where you can literally change every single setting down to the fine details, has been great.

    What needs improvement?

    The SpamTitan user interface is not amazing, but I don't mind it. I know they are releasing a new one soon. I have seen it and it looks a lot better. That has been an area that needs improvement.

    For how long have I used the solution?

    We have been using TitanHQ SpamTitan since December 2019, making it just over two years.

    What do I think about the stability of the solution?

    It just works. It has never broken in all the time that we've been using it. I don't think there are any other products we use that I can say have never stopped working.

    What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

    We're close to our limit now, so I need to speak to them to increase it. But as soon as it starts needing more resources, it uses them automatically. We have about 2,000 users on it.

    How are customer service and support?

    The biggest benefit of being a partner of TitanHQ is the support. We very rarely have issues, but whenever we do, it is sorted within minutes.

    I've never known a support team, for any of the products that we use, to come back as quickly as TitanHQ's support does. I had a query with them a few days ago about another product that we're using, EncryptTitan. It wasn't a problem, it was just a question that I had, and within about 10 minutes I had my answer.

    How would you rate customer service and support?

    Positive

    Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

    The solution that we used previously, Reflexion, was brilliant at the time, but they stopped developing it and it became a nightmare to use. It required constant work. The stability of SpamTitan versus that of Reflexion is a million times better.

    How was the initial setup?

    The setup is as easy or as hard as you want to make it. We made it quite hard because we went through every setting and configured absolutely everything on it. But if you want to just pick it up and run with it, it's really easy.

    It took me a full week, including moving all of our customers, to get it deployed.

    In terms of the implementation process, I spoke to SpamTitan about it. I asked them what they advised. It was just a case of moving people off our old solution and moving them onto SpamTitan. I had to do it one customer at a time to make sure that nothing broke in the process. TitanHQ were really helpful through that process.

    What was our ROI?

    We've started reselling SpamTitan to another MSP. We provide SpamTitan to them and they provide it to their customers. We support it for them. We're like the middleman between them and SpamTitan. That creates ROI because it's like free money since TitanHQ do all of the work. We support it if that MSP has any issues, but because it just works, they don't have issues.

    What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

    Compared to all of the others, including the solution we used previously, SpamTitan is cheaper.

    Which other solutions did I evaluate?

    We went through five or six options, including the big ones like Barracuda. And Sophos has a new product out.

    With SpamTitan, you get a lot more control. And the support is amazing. It also has more features, such as the Sandboxing Service. Some of the others have started to offer that now but, at the time, it was only SpamTitan that offered sandboxing through two different antivirus products. And obviously, pricing helped.

    What other advice do I have?

    They are constantly adding new products. SpamTitan is the way to go. I won't use anything else.

    Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

    Public Cloud
    Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor. The reviewer's company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner
    PeerSpot user
    Andy Arnone - PeerSpot reviewer
    President at Direct One
    Real User
    Gives us ability to scrub inbound and outbound emails, and our spam detection rate has gone up
    Pros and Cons
    • "Among the features that led us to choose SpamTitan are the ability to lock down, the multiple layers of security they have built into it, the ability to scrub inbound and outbound, as well as higher-level SPF and DMARC capabilities that were not really built into our previous product."
    • "The user interface of SpamTitan is fair, at best. They're coming out with a new one. The current one is a bit hard to navigate, and that was the biggest part of what made it a steep learning curve. It took three to six months to learn how to find stuff in there."

    What is our primary use case?

    We use it to catch and to help reduce spam, malware, and viruses coming into mailboxes.

    It's all on cloud, using their servers that are hosted on AWS.

    How has it helped my organization?

    One of the aspects of the solution that helps us acquire new customers, as a solution provider, is the ability to scrub inbound and outbound emails. The big selling point is that you don't send a customer a virus or some malware or grayware. We bundle it in automatically for all of our new customers. People don't have a choice. Most of our customers don't care which tools we use, as long as they're protected. When they ask, "Are we protected?" We say, "Yes." We have done our due diligence and that's why we picked SpamTitan.

    One of the benefits of being a partner with TitanHQ is that their help has been responsive. Our new account manager is quite responsive and keeps us abreast of all the updates coming down the pipe from them.

    Their partner program is good when it comes to partner profitability. We can make money off of them, on our margins. We can make money on what we sell.

    And in terms of benefits for clients, we had a site with an on-premises Exchange that went down for three or four days. With SpamTitan's ability to spool emails, no emails were lost or bounced during that transition. That is one of the features that people love. But with everything going into Office 365, if that's down, there's nothing you can do.

    Overall, our security has gotten better and spam detection has gone up.

    What is most valuable?

    Among the features that led us to choose SpamTitan are the 

    • ability to lock down
    • multiple layers of security they have built into it
    • ability to scrub inbound and outbound
    • higher-level SPF and DMARC capabilities that were not really built into our previous product.

    What needs improvement?

    The user interface of SpamTitan is fair, at best. They're coming out with a new one. The current one is a bit hard to navigate, and that was the biggest part of what made it a steep learning curve. It took three to six months to learn how to find stuff in there. It took us a while to ramp up everything. I would rate the intuitiveness as "low" because you can't find things. Now, I know where things are, but initially, it's a steep learning curve when we have new people come on board.

    There are also some issues with false positives. And when 15 to 20 people reply to a mass email, either in-house or an external one, SpamTitan blocks them, which causes issues. They go into the outbound quarantine, where users have to go in and manage it. That becomes a false positive, although it's actually doing what it's supposed to. But it can be annoying to the end-user.

    In addition, the problem with the daily quarantine report is that our customers can't whitelist or blacklist based on it. That is a feature that may be coming out. There was an Outlook add-on, a toolbar, but that doesn't work reliably across different versions of Outlook, or even the same versions of Outlook.

    The biggest beef we hear from customers is that they can't manage it right from the email. They can do an "allow" from the email, but they can't block a spam email without the toolbar or logging into the portal. That means they have to go through multiple steps and that's the part that they don't like. We hear that a lot. With other solutions, if I get a junk email I can open it up and at the bottom there will be a footer that says "block." That's not available with SpamTitan. We try to have customers look at the daily report, and they can allow right from the report, but they can't block. They have to go through multiple screens to block an email, without that Outlook toolbar, which has had issues. TitanHQ is aware of all of this.

    For how long have I used the solution?

    I've been using TitanHQ SpamTitan for a little bit over two years.

    What do I think about the stability of the solution?

    The stability has been very good. We have a cluster of two servers so that if one fails, the other one picks it up. Clustering was one of the key features we wanted and was something that wasn't offered by other providers. We didn't want to go through the downtime thing again. That's why we have the cluster. Stability is of incredibly high importance to us. People rely on email every day for orders, processing, and communication. If it's down and not able to do its job, companies and people can't do their jobs.

    What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

    The scalability is strong; very good. We have about 600 users. We'll continue adding new customers to SpamTitan. We already have a lot of this stuff in our firewalls and other spots. In terms of increasing usage, at this point, it's just status quo and using what they have. And we'll review some of their add-ons later.

    We have probably pushed almost 5 million messages through SpamTitan.

    How are customer service and support?

    Their support has been very responsive and helpful. The only issue is that support is located in Ireland and we're in Portland, Oregon. The time difference has been a challenge at times. It's not their fault, but when you need immediate help sometimes somebody is there, if it's an immediate or a system down.

    Their tech support is very good compared to the support provided by companies with competing solutions. That's an important aspect.

    How would you rate customer service and support?

    Positive

    Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

    We switched from a previous vendor, Reflexion Networks, that was bought by Sophos. They then had an outage for over a week or so and we decided to move. Another reason we switched was that they hadn't done any dev on it in years. They were sunsetting the product and they weren't bringing out any new features. When Sophos bought them I believe they were going to migrate everybody to their platform and we didn't want to move to Sophos at that time.

    How was the initial setup?

    It was difficult to set up. It just wasn't intuitive. And the sales guy we had sold us pie in the sky and we had to deal with support quite a bit. There were a lot of tickets and a lot of initial frustration about why things weren't working. But once we cracked the code for a couple of customers, then the rest were a lot easier. The first three or four were rough.

    That's why a better interface would be helpful. They're aware of the fact that they were taking everything any partner wanted and jamming it into the old interface. It went probably from a "Toyota Camry" to a "Ford Expedition" hauling a trailer. That happens in software development. They're supposed to be streamlining that. And that's the part that's hard: finding things. When you talk to support they say, "Go here," and then you think, "Oh, there it is." The interface isn't intuitive.

    I don't feel we were onboarded very well. It was like a hodgepodge of answers from our sales rep and customer service. There was never a planned onboarding process. What wasn't there was a statement like, "We'll walk you through everything you need to do." A better onboarding process would be best for new partners. They should walk new partners through the first couple of setups.

    There was also the issue of helping our end-users and customers understand the changes that we were making and the different reports. 

    But since we got it set up, it's been fine with no issues. We have two people who are responsible for the maintenance of the solution, a network engineer and our help desk central services.

    The first couple of setups took at least a week, including the settings and all the other stuff they had to have us add into Office 365. Now, it takes us an hour to set up a new customer.

    What was our ROI?

    We have seen ROI from the solution. The price point is right and we're able to make a margin on it. We're actually making it profitable, rather than breaking even.

    What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

    The cluster was an additional cost. We had to get some more licenses to get to that level. It's well worth it because it means peace of mind for everyone.

    Which other solutions did I evaluate?

    We researched and demoed several solutions, and TitanHQ came out of that on top. We looked at Barracuda, SonicWall, and Zerospam. We went with TitanHQ because of the price and features.

    TitanHQ's key differentiators, for its partners, are the pricing and support.

    Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor. The reviewer's company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner
    PeerSpot user
    Rafik Kattoum - PeerSpot reviewer
    Infra manager at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
    Real User
    Users can access their quarantines and decide to whitelist, block, or blacklist emails, which frees up our service desk team
    Pros and Cons
    • "The standout features include the anti-phishing feature, which is particularly advantageous as far as our clients are concerned; it was a very welcome addition for many of them."
    • "The quarantine report frequency could be better."

    What is our primary use case?

    We're an MSP providing IT services and we host mail servers in Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates.

    We host SpamTitan behind a firewall, and the SpamTitan appliances talk to a first load balancer. The load balancer directs the traffic to our mail servers which are still in the DMZ. After the Edge servers, they redirect the mail flow to our internal firewalls. From these firewalls, we go to another load balancer and the backend infrastructure, where we have our mailboxes.

    How has it helped my organization?

    As a SpamTitan MSP, several aspects of TitanHQ's technology help us acquire new customers and add value to our services and product offerings. These include the anti-spam efficiency, the efficiency of the antivirus engine included in the product, and the self-service user quarantine. Since deploying the tool, we have had almost no viruses, and the malware detection is excellent. 

    TitanHQ works hard to provide the best service, which can be challenging as client service is an art, but they have made many improvements recently. They're always seeking client feedback regarding support services, which we appreciate. They're constantly developing new features, some become premium, and some they offer for free, such as anti-phishing features. TitanHQ recently developed a new feature called Link Lock, which our clients appreciated and even convinced some prospective clients to join, as that's a selling point for us as an anti-spam product.    

    The most significant benefit of being a TitanHQ partner is that they care about how they provide:

    • Services.
    • The efficiency of their services.
    • The quality of the client experience.

    In terms of real, tangible benefits for our clients, by upgrading to SpamTitan, we were able to reverse the trend of dissatisfaction in our customer base. It changed the quality of our services for the better.   

    SpamTitan spares a significant amount of employee time and effort by not having to sort through spam and junk emails. The end-user quarantine mailbox and the self-service portal offered to every end-user through a web portal are convenient and time-saving features. Users can access their quarantines and decide to whitelist, block, or blacklist emails, which frees up our service desk team. The time we spend going through junk and spam emails dramatically decreased by around 40-50% compared to our old solution, and our service desk team is now happy with our infrastructure services. It used to be a nightmare with our old provider. 

    We've also seen a dramatic improvement in our spam catch rate and a reduction in false positives since implementing SpamTitan. Our clients' main criticism of us was the lack of flexibility in the previous anti-spam solution we used. Now we have flexibility, transparency, and efficiency, which all matter to our clients and us.

    What is most valuable?

    All the features are valuable; mail security isn't about one feature but rather a collection of features. The good thing about SpamTitan is its versatility because it offers every feature we need. They're not always easy to implement, but we have access to the entire suite required by an MSP like us to provide the best service possible to our clients. We appreciate that, and everything we could wish for regarding email security is included in the product.

    The standout features include the anti-phishing feature, which is particularly advantageous as far as our clients are concerned; it was a very welcome addition for many of them. 

    The ability to do mail sandboxing before delivering and receiving emails for antivirus and anti-malware detection is excellent.

    The double antivirus and anti-malware engine utilizing Clam AntiVirus and Bitdefender, plus all the standard security processes, including anti-spoofing detection, DKIM, and business email compromise (BEC) features, make for a robust security profile. We appreciate these features, and they all work very well.

    What needs improvement?

    The quarantine report frequency could be better. 

    Sometimes we have specific concerns and requests for TitanHQ that their product can't currently cater to because it's not designed for it. We are often told this will be included in the roadmap. Still, we need visibility on when it will be deployed, when a requested feature will become available, or even tested. More transparency on this front would be a big plus.

    For how long have I used the solution?

    We've been using SpamTitan for a little over three years. 

    What do I think about the stability of the solution?

    The solution is stable and reliable; we never had an issue regarding operational stability and service access. We only had third-party issues or problems related to our infrastructure services.

    What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

    The solution is scalable; we run it as a virtual machine, so we have the associated flexibility. As long as we pay for them, we can add as many nodes as we need. We never had to worry about scaling the product.

    We currently have around 1,500 end users. 

    How are customer service and support?

    The technical support is responsive and client-oriented; they care about the client. They listen to client complaints and continually work to improve their services, so we are very satisfied. The support isn't ideal or perfect, and in some cases, we weren't completely satisfied, but TitanHQ always tries to do better based on our feedback.

    Comparing SpamTitan's customer support team versus our previous solution, it's night and day, which is one of the reasons we switched to them. SpamTitan changed our lives as an MSP in terms of mail security.  

    When we open tickets with them, we know they will help us in a timely and efficient way, which gives us peace of mind. This wasn't the case with our previous solution; we always chased technicians for a working solution and feedback. With TitanHQ, it's the other way around; they chase us for feedback, and they're concerned with the quality and relevance of their support. They care about the client experience, and that's great.

    How would you rate customer service and support?

    Positive

    Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

    We previously used Broadcom SMG and switched because we were unsatisfied with the product. We had a lot of false positives and spam getting through, so we wanted to improve our situation significantly. We met with a SpamTitan sales team, who were very convincing. We agreed that we needed their product and implemented the on-prem solution.

    How was the initial setup?

    As I'm the Infrastructure Manager, I was involved in the deployment, and we were surprised by how easy the deployment was. TitanHQ has a very well-done online wiki, which made the setup elementary. The initial deployment took a few days, and the most challenging part was to cut over from our old solution without impacting our clients and end users. Aside from that, the deployment was a breeze.

    We finalized the agreement on the licensing, downloaded the SpamTitan images as we were running VMware as a hypervisor, deployed the images, made the network configurations, and double-checked that they were correctly done. We then started testing the mail flow, and when this was conclusive, we started the client migration. I carried out the deployment alone for the most part, with one other employee to double-check the setup, which is our company policy for deploying a new product.

    The only maintenance required is part of a lifecycle management process we have as a company, in which we're required to check for obsolete hardware and software revisions regularly. SpamTitan is no exception, and it's very straightforward; we check if there's a software update available through a GUI, and if there is, we take a snapshot as we're running a virtual machine. We back up with our backup solution as an additional safety layer and go through the upgrade; it's an ideal process.

    What was our ROI?

    We have a considerable ROI; we lost clients with our previous tool, whereas now we have expanded our client base and are getting prospective clients because we have a reliable solution.

    What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

    The price is quite advantageous; we were initially surprised at the pricing compared to other solutions, which made us doubt if this was the solution for us. Then, we discovered SpamTitan's features and how cost-effective it is. The sales team does an excellent job making our life easier in terms of pricing, which is another significant advantage of this product.

    Which other solutions did I evaluate?

    We evaluated MailCleaner and a more expensive solution, Cisco Secure Email, which we didn't find cost-effective. We made a product comparison and decided to go with SpamTitan, and we don't regret our choice.

    What other advice do I have?

    I rate the solution eight out of ten. 

    TitanHQ's key differentiator for its partners is the level of support services; they're fast, responsive, efficient, and care about client satisfaction. That's the main differentiator, plus the fact that their product is constantly evolving with new features.   

    We don't use the solution's geo-blocking feature because we are not convinced by IP-based blocking instead of location-based. We know geolocation based on a GPS location is challenging, and very few providers offer it, but the current state of IP-based geolocation features is not a requirement for us or our client base.

    TitanHQ needs to continue surveying us for client satisfaction regarding their support services, as that's important to us. We appreciate it when they send us emails from time to time asking about our opinion or satisfaction. We also appreciate how they get back to us when a new feature becomes available that could help us improve our services, so we want them to keep this up.

    My advice to others evaluating SpamTitan is to refer to the excellent wiki hosted on the solution's website or contact the amazing, client-focused L2 and L3 staff, who are happy to answer any query.

    Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

    On-premises
    Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor. The reviewer's company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: MSP
    PeerSpot user
    Buyer's Guide
    Download our free TitanHQ SpamTitan Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
    Updated: October 2024
    Buyer's Guide
    Download our free TitanHQ SpamTitan Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.