TitanHQ SpamTitan Reviews

We have it in front of Microsoft 365 for spam filtering.

SpamTitan's geo-blocking feature is very exciting. On my old server, we spent quite a lot of time building countrywide address blocks. Now, that is completely redundant with the geoblocking. To be fair, it's not just SpamTitan that does it. I see it in lots of places. We do that regularly on firewalls.

But if we're building a new system for people, we'll say, "Do you communicate with any high-risk countries?" If they say, "Yeah, probably. What are the high-risk countries?" we can say, "We have a list of what we considered high-risk, and we can block all of those in one tick." They will say, "Yeah, please, because we get a lot of spam from various countries." That's great. And I presume that it's updated fairly regularly.

When we implemented the geoblocking, it made an immediate and obvious difference to the amount of spam that was being quarantined. It reduced the amount of spam by more than 50 percent.

Doing geoblocking by IP is hard work. It's possible, but the nature of spam is that it's sent out by the spammers using botnets and VPNs to cover their tracks. There's a lot of to-and-fro in the war against spam, but knocking out a whole dodgy country is very good.

Also, when we talk to our customers about cyber security and they mention they have spam and viruses coming in through their email, we can tell them what we can do to help resolve that. We would then look with them at either the time savings or the cost savings, versus the investment they'd have to make in the SpamTitan licensing and say, "When you look at the benefits, they are going to be much greater than the costs. Why would you not do it?"

And once customers have that kind of focus when looking at the issue, they'll make a choice and they'll stick with it. They'll probably have it in place for years because it becomes "a part of the furniture." They take it as a given that they've got protection. They're happy with what it's doing. It's removing swaths of malware and nuisance emails and they're happy that it works.

When looking at our own organization, it used to be the case that people would be looking at their inboxes every day and clearing out junk. They could potentially spend an average of about 15 minutes doing that at the beginning of a day, and perhaps have a few more goes at tidying things up through the day. Before we were using SpamTitan, every person in our company would be losing half an hour or more, every day, just de-junking their inboxes. To take that down, now, to a matter of seconds through a quick scan of the quarantine or a report is really great.

And overall, it has definitely improved our spam catch rate.

One of the most valuable features is the opportunity to quarantine things. In addition, the option to have somebody manage the quarantine on behalf of users, or to let the system send out daily reports so that users can manage things on their own, are both very straightforward.

Slightly larger customers in particular have different requirements from those at the very small end. For the larger ones, applying global rules is difficult because, even within one organization, there are many teams, such as sales at one end and accounts at the other end. That means that the types of emails that each team is processing can be very different. If all you have is a solution that looks at every piece of email and applies the same types of rules, you don't get a very smart solution. Whereas, if you can do it per mailbox or per domain, like you can with SpamTitan, that means you are effectively able to configure it almost per-user, which is great.

The user interface is fine. It's fairly quick. Sometimes it's a little bit slow in loading a quarantine list, but it's nothing that's too painful or a problem. The user interface is very workable. In terms of the solution's intuitiveness, it all makes sense.

I have noticed that TitanHQ adds new features quite frequently. If I have one little feature request, it would be that they shout a little bit more about the new features they're adding. I haven't blocked them from sending me marketing emails and I wouldn't be averse to having more of them, particularly for the new features. That's really important because it gives us an opportunity to go to customers and prospects and say, "Look, this is our preferred product, and here is what they've just brought out now."

Also, false positives may be an area for improvement. It's very rare that we see false negatives, but false positives might be an area where I, myself, could put some more effort into looking at the settings. There are various settings that could probably be optimized. Perhaps that's something in the user interface that isn't hugely clear. There is a spam score threshold through which you can reject spam when an item has greater score than the setting. I wouldn't call it counterintuitive, but it takes a little bit of thought. Having set it up, it works very well, so I am happy with it.

Finally, a minor point is that I looked at another system that had the ability to deliver to multiple inbound servers, which is something I don't think SpamTitan does, although I haven't followed up by going back to my own installation of SpamTitan to see if could I set that up there. But it's not a big deal. Most people are not going to be doing really complicated things like having multiple inbound mail servers with completely different addresses.

We have been using TitanHQ SpamTitan for more than three years. We initially bought a three-year package and that was renewed a few months ago.

The stability is fine. I don't think I've ever seen an outage of any sort.

I can't see that there would be an issue when it comes to scalability. If the software is managing millions of transactions a day, it's not going to make very much difference if you go from two million to three million a day. I would imagine it is highly scalable.

We've had very little need to talk to tech support. That says it all. I'm very satisfied with how the support works.

But for partners like us, it's the ease of access to the company that is one of the key differentiators. I'm not sure of the size of TitanHQ in comparison to some of the others, but I'm a great believer in working with SME providers. Quite often, we find that the smaller providers are much more nimble in their relations with their partners and also with their development roots. Some of the huge companies are lumbering, clumsy organizations. While it's not that I'm on a first-name basis with all of the people in TitanHQ, because that's far from the truth, the relationship with them is a lot closer than, say, the relationship with Microsoft, which is a company that it's never easy to get close to.

To be fair and realistic about it, this is just one of the solutions that we have in our portfolio. Potentially, we could put more effort into looking at the marketing resources TitanHQ have. That connects back to what I said before, that I wouldn't object to having a bit more of a push from their side regarding new features and marketing initiatives. That would prompt me to take opportunities actively, as opposed to reactively from customers when they say, "What do we do about spam?"

Positive

We originally went with Microsoft’s built-in spam filtering but decided it was rubbish. We looked around for a better solution and chose SpamTitan.

Microsoft 365 is stable but it's just inadequate. It has typical, crazy Microsoft logic behind it, whereas SpamTitan looks like something that has been developed by people who understand the problem they needed to solve. Its basic technology is very much better than Microsoft's.

SpamTitan was very easy when it came to the setup and configuration and it's easy to use. It would make it an uphill struggle if it was difficult to configure. We do get situations with other products where "difficult to install" can actually be a complete showstopper. That does not apply to SpamTitan. It's very easy to install.

For example, I have a customer that has changed their order processing software three times during the relationship over many years. While the latest one that they have, which looks very slick and modern on the face of it, the installation process is absolutely horrible. Even to do things like configuring multiple users on one PC with this particular software, requires a complete, messy uninstall, registry edits, and then a reinstall for a different user. It will not accept having multiple configurations on one PC.

When I compare that with SpamTitan, which, of course, is not working at the PC level but at the network level, that problem is never going to occur. The ease of installation and use is important. If that long-standing customer came to me and said, "We're thinking of changing again. What are the top-three things to look out for?" I would tell them, "Well, this messy installation that you have on the current one is a showstopper because it takes so much time for our team to configure it, and that costs you money."

The closer it gets to plug-and-play, the better.

With SpamTitan, the deployment was trivial. It was very quick. Going from the starting point, where you've got Outlook on a PC talking to Microsoft 365 with nothing between them, through to having SpamTitan in between the two, took minutes. And that's only done once per organization. The benefits of SpamTitan can be seen as soon as you can measure them. It's not something that takes an awful long time to get up to speed. It just works, straight out-of-the-box.

It's a very good product and the pricing and licensing are exceptionally reasonable. TitanHQ's partner program is fine when it comes to partner profitability.

I do potentially have a question about the pricing policy. It works on the basis of billing per mailbox. I thought, "Oh, that's a bit weird," when I first looked into it. On a Microsoft setup—almost everybody we deal with has Microsoft 365—you can have a lot of aliases. In a very small company that has a dozen users, they'll have a dozen mailboxes, but they may have 50 aliases. The SpamTitan product looks at those aliases as individual mailboxes. At the end of the day, that doesn't really matter, because you can count what is the unit of measurement that you're going to use, whether it is a person, a domain, a mailbox, or everything that could be an email address. I don't mind, it works. It's just, perhaps, a slightly quirky way of doing it.

Also, when I did a couple of renewals recently, the salesperson who was talking to me might not have been quite up to speed with the products and the pricing. It took me a few goes, sending emails forwards and back, to actually get an order placed and to get confirmation of the price that we had negotiated. At the end of the day it worked, so it wasn't a problem.

Back in the day, I used to run my own mail servers using Mercury Mail Servers. That was effectively an open-source package which was very straightforward and very manageable. It also had 30 third-party bolt-ons, one of which was a Bayesian spam filtering tool. It would learn on the basis of the training that you gave it, which at the time, I thought, was very clever. These days, there is a lot of spam filtering that is not all that clever. There seem to be quite a few holes in it. But when I did an evaluation of SpamTitan I thought, "Yeah, this is exactly what we want. It has everything." It has filtering, quarantine, blacklisting, and malware protection.

It’s good to be a partner of TitanHQ so that we have something in our portfolio that we can offer to people. However, there's a lot of resistance out there, particularly at the SME end of the market. When we start a discussion about how they do their malware and spam filtering, a lot of people say, "Well, it's all built into Microsoft." We might then get into a discussion along the lines of, “Yeah, it's built into Microsoft, but it's not very good. And it doesn't seem to be getting any better as time goes by, and it's very awkward to use.” Yet, quite often, we run into people who say, "We don't want to pay for an add-on when we think that it can be done with other software packages." This is our challenge when we go to prospects, or to existing customers when we're discussing upselling to them: There is still quite a lot of resistance. It's just one of those things that we have to work to overcome.

My advice would be to come to our office and we'll show it to you in action. We can show you the stats and how easy it is to add things to whitelists and blacklists and  to adjust the parameters. We can show you all these cool features it has.

Using geoblocking for allowing exemptions based on a trusted sender's IP domain or email address is okay, although we haven't done much of that yet. I can envisage situations where potentially we could, but there are cases where I have a bit of a dilemma as to whether to block or whether to not block. China is a good example of that. We could do without getting an awful lot of the stuff that we get from China. But equally, one of our biggest customers is a global manufacturing business and they have a presence in China. I can't really say to them, "Hey, why don't you block China?"

We can always take the position of blocking or not blocking on a per-country basis. And then, if we've blocked and shouldn't have, we can just set up some exceptions and probably come up with the right solution. There's work to be done but that's true of a lot of aspects of cyber security. You've got to put effort into it and you've got to keep updating what you're doing with it.

I've yet to find anybody who would come to us simply on the basis that we provide SpamTitan, but it's definitely a very good value-added tool. For in-house use it's almost invaluable because it goes back to the fundamentals of how you do spam filtering and defense.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Positive

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?"

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.

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.

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.

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.

Positive

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

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.

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!!! 

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.

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!

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.

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.

We use it for spam filtering.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Positive

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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%. 

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.

• 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.

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.

I have been using it for three years.

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

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.

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. 

Positive

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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."

I have been using it since October 2020.

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.

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.

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. 

Positive

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.

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.

We had TitanHQ help us with anything that we needed.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Positive

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.
  

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Positive

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.