TitanHQ SpamTitan Reviews

For our clients who are big enough, and have the ability with their firewalls, we sometimes go in and put SpamTitan right on their firewalls. Or, if we are moving everybody to Office 365, then we use it that way with the Microsoft side of things. We also do a lot of refined stuff with that as well. 

We have some clients who have been around for a long time, meaning that their domain has been out there for a while and they have had a high turnover of workers. A lot of them had huge amounts of spam coming in. When we were running the Exchange servers, they were being swamped before we had something like this solution put on. Once we put on SpamTitan, it was a big relief for me. I could sleep that night. Also, it took pressure off our infrastructure. 

The deployment is fine. It works great. It is just one thing that we have to deal with, not a bunch of things. That makes it a lot easier than the way we were doing things before.

We had one company where we had to teach them about how SpamTitan works, even though the owner was teaching his employees not to open stuff and that they needed to be responsible. We then had to tell them what they have to do as well so they don't circumvent things as employees and users. One time, the owner actually opened up an email from Nigeria, and they are in Canada, where somebody was applying with a resume. It encrypted everything that they had. I asked him, "Why would you open up a resume? You're not looking to hire anybody. Why would you open something up from somewhere from someone you didn't know anything about?" This was a company that had satellite offices all around the region. It puts a lot of people out of work in a hurry. Having this type of solution put in afterwards helped a lot because they had been around for so long and had so much spam coming in. They had used their corporate emails to sign up for just about anything out there, so they were getting a lot of junk. We cut all that down, which was one of the things that has helped us. 

Once we were able to put them on to SpamTitan, because they only deal within a local area, we put the geo-blocking feature on for Canada. This saved on a lot of that stuff that was coming into them. When we turned it on, they removed about 40% of the stuff that was coming in. The spam was coming from outside of their location. So, that was a big thing. The geo-blocking feature makes sense whenever you can do it. You can also scrub the outgoing mail so you can protect yourself from getting on a blacklist, in case something was going wrong on your side of the fence. 

Another example, we have one company who wanted to make sure that credit cards and things like that were blocked. So, SpamTitan has things like that built-in.

With the ransomware stuff going on, especially with larger customers, they have to take this solution or we don't look after them. This is because we don't want our time and name dragged through the mud.

We now have tens of thousands of emails a day that we are logging for some of our customers.

Some clients don't want to know anything. Other clients like the fact that they have the opportunity to get this report. It comes in and shows them everything that has been collected. They can log in, manage all that at any time, and clean it. It is a safety net for them so they feel comfortable. In some cases, it actually helps in the education of the end user's infrastructure. You take them through and show them, and say, "You have some responsibilities and control here that you can manage. This is a top-level device to do this." Some of them really take pride in the fact that they can and want to do it. Therefore, it is a good tool that shows them why things are even being caught, how it appears, and why it is being picked up. The more that you can educate your end user, the safer you are keeping everybody.

We have just one place to go and look at things, which makes it a lot easier for us. Our users like the fact that it is granular when they look at it. Some guys are really proficient in certain areas and this lends itself to that, which is good. They can then learn the other parts that they didn't have when we were on other systems. You can just log into the back-end and can see everything or whatever you want to see. If you need to actually go through the email and look for one to release, it is easy to find. 

When the client gets it, we show them how they get daily reports. SpamTitan is easy for them to use and they can manage their own spam.

There is a built-in antivirus, we keep that turned on. It is really great.

We have set the attachment filters for inbound and outbound. We educate our people about attachments coming in. They will say that so-and-so sent us something, but it didn't come through. Well, it is not going to come through.

They have a huge amount of things that we haven't even probably thought about.

We aren't trying to develop software. We just want something to use. However, when you get into it, you can control the RBL servers as well as add ones to it, if you want to. There is your Sender Policy Framework (SPF), which is good because a lot of government agencies started using it. It is great that you can use it yourself and keep things compliant.

There are top-level domains if you want to start blocking at that level. You have all kinds of granular things. 

There are SMTP controls. 

I don't have to go into the server and do the updates. We just set the server to automatically stay updated by hour, week, etc. 

You can turn on macro scanning, which is kind of neat. 

We have the state-browsing database turned on that Google uses. We have that on ours. 

The patterning filtering is neat. Once you start along the patterns, you can see what is going on. This will sort of help with that. It is kind of interesting to see how these patterns formulate, then all of a sudden, you see what is going to happen. 

If you want to schedule and archive reports, it is great if you had to do an investigation down the road, then you can go back and look at that stuff. Because in those reports that you run, patterns will be there. Those things are really useful. 

When someone is looking at it, they find it intuitive and easy to get around on the back-end to do what needs to be done.

Before, I didn't know what some of the things would do if turned on, i.e., things that we hadn't used previously. Now, I see that they give you further information on it and take you right to a web page. That is something that I wanted done before and can see that it is there now. I did check this just the other day. That would have been a complaint, but it is not now.

Sometimes, things can get caught back in spam that you had previously released. Without going in, releasing the whole domain, and opening it up, since you don't want to do that often because the company can get infected as well, I have a couple of things that I previously released show back up again. I don't understand why this is happening, but I would like to know why it happened, e.g., did an algorithm change? It is important to know if I released an email last week why it was caught in spam the following week.

We have been using the solution for close to six years.

The stability is very good. We haven't had any issues at all with any of it. Everything that we have had an issue with is either because Microsoft Servers or Amazon servers has done something temporarily, or we have done something ourselves. The uptime has been fantastic.

From our perspective, it is very scalable because we are not a huge company. Our clients are all over the place. We have government offices, small mom-and-pop businesses, etc. We are in every sector, whether it be the retail sector, legal, government, etc. We do it all. Because of where we are located, there are not that many people who can specialize in and cover big and small businesses or organizations. Therefore, we have to look after everybody in their area and know a lot of different things.

There are all kinds of blogs and alerts. If you want to set alerts for yourself, you can do that. I haven't used it. However, when we were setting it up, we wanted to know, depending on your growth, what would happen if we brought on another bigger customer and you moved us to another system? You won't have to go through the entire setup again. You can just put multiple servers together and cluster them, then you can do all your controls from one server.

Support is really good. Recently, they hired a new person. This person works with people like us to find out if we have any issues or things that we don't like about TitanHQ's solution, e.g., the way that they do business or their features. I can just send off an email and get a quick answer that is directed to the right people, which makes a big difference to me. That is one of the biggest things that they did lately that is really good. 

I was frustrated with some of their million processes. Support got right in and straightened that all out. I know that they were probably amalgamating systems or something at the time. I'm not sure. However, that has all been sorted by one support person, and that makes my life a lot easier.

I would have rated support lower before. Everything used to be all siloed. You would go to either finance, support, licensing, etc. Now, I have somebody who will take it right to the top or to those departments, getting it straightened out. That is so important to me.

Right now, I can't complain about anything. I would now rate them as nine or 10 (out of 10). I can talk to my support person, Emma, first about something and find out whether I need to raise a ticket. I have a voice in the company that I never had before.

I like dealing with them because they are from Ireland. Sometimes, when I will call into major call centers, they are not personable. When you are talking to their staff from Ireland, it is a lot like talking to people in Canada. People are nice. I get that from all their levels, and I like that. I really do like that because I only get calls from clients when there is something wrong. So, everybody is always in a hyper state. When I call my backup support, they know that we are all working on the same level for the same thing. I am not greeted with someone thinking, "Do I really want to take this call or not?" They are polite and I am greeted with someone who is nice and genuinely wants to help. 

This is a big thing because I have dealt with some companies who were bought and taken over on the security side. We just completely left them because of their support and the way that people treated you. It is a big difference in feeling that they are nice.

Positive

We were doing some stuff with Barracuda. We had them for a few years. We also had one of the bigger solutions out there at the time; it was one of the first ones that was out. With the pricing model, I never knew where I really stood. It is alright if you have huge clients who warranted their stuff, but when we first started, we didn't have huge clients that wanted their solution. Instead, we had smaller clients. It helped us when we moved to this market with SpamTitan. I also knew where my costs were coming from. So, it was a little bit of a different move. A lot of people go to these solutions because they have huge clients at first. We didn't have huge clients at first, so it was a different way of getting into this business.

Once we moved to SpamTitan, we then looked at their other stuff, moving to ArcTitan and WebTitan as well. We use all of TitanHQ's platforms. It is a really nice system, as far as we are concerned. 

It is very easy to set up. It didn't take long at all. 

We worked with the TitanHQ team when we did the initial setup. They explained everything to us, e.g., if we wanted something on, if we didn't want it on, at what level, and how granular. That was good. When you are going with a new company, there is no way that you can know everything that you need to know about all of that. Something that is this important, you need to allow the experts to help you go through the steps, then you can go back to it on your own. 

Because the guys who are doing this on my side of the fence are in and out of it all the time, working with clients and checking on stuff, we are able to reveal the whole email without harming anything. We can look and see the entire background of where it came from and follow that through.

SpamTitan has helped us big time with improving our spam catch rate and reduced our false positive rate. This took a lot of weight off our shoulders because we were spending a lot of time managing the Exchange servers. 

When you are looking at what they were processing before people started using these cloud-type solutions, it really has made a big difference for us on the administration side. For example, when there is an attack going around the world, such as the ones on the news, that is a lot of sleep you can lose in a hurry from our perspective behind the scenes if you know certain clients who don't have this type of solution. 

All our clients warrant this type of solution. We just won't allow them to work with us unless we put these types of solutions in place, because it is too nerve-wracking. It only takes one client to decide that they don't want this, then they get infected, it affects all your staff and other clients, and then you have to spend time trying to get them back up and going again when something like this could have prevented it.

We have taken clients in and shown them how much email has been coming through. When showing them the back-end of it, e.g., the blocking and numbers, they are like, "Oh my God." Sometimes we will take a particular email and show them how much is coming through on that. We then tell them, "When you sign up for something and you use the corporate email, this is what can happen."

When it comes to the scalability of it, it really doesn't matter much because of the way that it is priced. You can put it on somebody who is small or big. I am not big enough to worry about growing out of anything that they are doing. You can put it on a different server for a bigger client, and that is not a big problem. I can still manage it from one place.

We looked at different platforms. We wanted to get into something that was intuitive on the back-end and where everything was visible from one place. 

We were the first ones for whom ArcTitan put in a Canadian server. We required mail archiving, but it had to be done in Canada because of client requirements. I couldn't find anybody in Canada that had a mail archiving server in Canada at the time, so I told ArcTitan about it. They said, "Okay, you are a customer of ours already on SpamTitan, so we will." So they flamed up a server in Canada and put it on Canadian soil, which is what we needed. We didn't have that anywhere else. Just the fact that they did that for us, and we were the first ones, it took about a month for things to get all done, but it was done. We were able to strike the Canadian server and put it on. I thought, "These people do want to do business. They care." That was great and I was impressed.

When I am talking to a client, I tell them we will be using SpamTitan. If they are a big company and require that their mail gets archived, then I also tell them about ArcTitan.

If you are starting off, do not worry because TitanHQ will help you set it up. Once it is there, if you have never used one before, it is no big deal. Once set up, you can look at it and read about it. You can see how it all works together. You get to see the movement of everything happening. You will soon understand it. It is not hard. It does have a lot of granular stuff, but only when you want to get into that does it matter. When you look at it, you get to understand it. It is like putting the furniture in the room is much easier to understand than when you are trying to picture it when there is nothing there.

For anybody who demands high-end control, I don't know what is not there. Everything seems to be all in place. I know that they are now using the new technology that is coming out, e.g., where you have the AI do some stuff.

You have some heavy-duty professionals running a global company to try and protect it and all these people. It makes me feel good that somebody big enough is doing this and they just don't hang their coat on the spam mail. They are doing archiving, where you have to understand another process - mail servers. They are also doing the web side of things. 

I would rate them as nine out of 10. The only reason that I am not giving 10 is because two years ago I would have given them a lower rating for being siloed. Since Emma has bridged all their departments for us, that has changed and been turned around.

We're a relatively small company, and SpamTitan provides our spam filtering solution. I have 16 email boxes out there right now, including individual email addresses and generic email addresses for sales, customer service, etc. Outside of the normal SpamTitan features, we don't use any other TitanHQ products or any other features aside from filtering and reporting.

To be honest, it wasn't much of an improvement over Barracuda except for the price point. Barracuda had more granularity as far as how deep I could dig. I think that had more to do with the fact that we had the appliance on-site, so it gave me more features. 

On the other hand, SpamTitan is effortless to manage and administer. They do a lot more behind the scenes, so I can't access the configuration. However, I honestly don't think I needed most of the configuration options that I had with Barracuda. A lot of that was overkill. I can understand where some companies might need more of it, but it was absolutely fine for our needs. 

Spam filtering, in general, is a big time saver. We've had a spam filter for many years now. I think we originally bought Barracuda in 2005 or 2006. The difference between having a spam filter and not having one is night and day. Our CEO was getting upwards of about 600 emails per day, and that went down to around 40. He was pleased with the results we got from Barracuda. SpamTitan maintained that performance. The amount of unwanted emails is minimal compared to what we see in our reports.

SpamTitan probably saves hours of time. It also prevents employees from missing important emails because they have become desensitized to them. Spam makes email less effective as a communications tool. You stop looking at your email when all you get is junk all the time. 

I don't get much employee feedback about spam filtering, but there were some new features when we switched to SpamTitan. For example, Barracuda wouldn't give you a report, but SpamTitan sends a daily individual report to each user identifying questionable emails in quarantine and asking them if they want to allow them. 

It took a couple of days to get everyone trained and on board with how it worked. Nobody complains or says anything about it. Occasionally, someone misses an email they're expecting, and I have to show them that the email might be in quarantine. The impacts are minimal. 

We get reports on blocked emails. I review them weekly to see who the heavy hitters are inside the office. We need our email addresses out there to do business, so we have sales and customer service email addresses that need to be out there. Those are the biggest targets for spam. SpamTitan cuts down the amount of spam that we receive, but it's about the same as Barracuda. 

Initially, I had some issues where we were getting emails coming in that appeared to come in from our own internal domain. My company is called M2 Systems, so our domain name is M2-corp.com. I had to get on with support twice to get them to help me mitigate or block that from happening. 

On Barracuda, it was much easier to click a switch or a button to disallow this. It was more my unfamiliarity, but I think they could make it a little easier to keep the origination from looking like it comes from the internal domain.

We started in June 2020, so we've been a SpamTitan customer for around two years.

I rate SpamTitan 10 out of 10.

SpamTitan is scalable. It comes into their systems, but it all filters. We only have a single mail server, and everybody retrieves mail from there. I can't personally speak to its scalability because we're not large enough to really have other offices or anything like that. However, if we were to add a hundred more users, the only aspect that I assume would change would be the pricing model. We would go to a higher level because we'd have more mailboxes to filter.

I rate TitanHQ support 10 out of 10. They responded quickly. TitanHQ has a separate portal for issues that are unrelated to administering the SpamTitan environment. I showed them what we were seeing and asked why we were seeing this. They explained the issue well, and we got it fixed.

Positive

We had a Barracuda spam firewall model 200 that was up for renewal. You have to renew the license annually to keep the product up to date. It was on the pricey side already, and they had increased the price by about 30-40%. 

My company only had about 25 mailboxes that needed protection at the time, so the cost was out of line with what we were thinking. We did a one-month evaluation of SpamTitan and found that it met our needs as well as Barracuda.

The fact that we didn't need to buy hardware was one deciding factor. This is a hosted product, so we only needed to point our DNS to their mail system and have our mail server retrieve it from them. In terms of integration, the pain was minimal. We just made a couple of DNS entries. I liked Barracuda as a product. The problem was the pricing was getting excessive for the amount of coverage we need. 

I was involved throughout the whole setup. I'm the only IT person here and have been since about 2017. Setting up SpamTitan is straightforward. I had no issues with the evaluation phase or the final production conversion. 

You point to their server and retrieve the email from there. After that, I had to inform our users that we were switching from Barracuda to SpamTitan. There might be a 30-minute disruption in the email services. It was easy to switch. Aside from a few minor issues, we had no problems whatsoever. It doesn't require any maintenance aside from changing the internal settings so that we don't get external emails that look like it's coming from us.

We see a return from not having to deal with spam on our inbound emails. It absolutely pays for us to have this.

I'm pleased with the pricing. We're happy with their licensing model. It was a major factor in why we chose them. The ease of use and conversion were the other two. 

Aside from the domain origination issue, everything else has worked fantastically. I don't have any complaints about them at all. The price was what we expected to pay, given the number of users that we had.

I had a few different products suggested to me, and SpamTitan was one of them.

I rate SpamTitan 10 out of 10. The only aspect you need to know is how to administer an email in a DNS system. An inexperienced IT person could do this without issue. 

Our primary use case is filtering incoming emails.

SpamTitan is a product that saves us time. The less spam that you have, the more time you have because you're not digging through the mail that hits your inbox. The other thing is that it blocks potential trojans, viruses, and phishing attempts. This means that IT has less to deal with in case something does get through and opened, resulting in an infection.

On the front end, the user community doesn't have nearly as much email to deal with, in particular, spam messages. On the back end for IT, it's a huge time saver because we're not infecting our network with malware.

Before we got SpamTitan, the amount of time spent dealing with unwanted emails depended on the user. People that were dealing with a lot of outside entities would receive more spam because their email address is out there. Depending on the user, they might have three or four spam messages, or somebody might have between 20 and 30 to deal with.

For people on the higher end, with 20 or 30 spam messages that are hitting their inbox, it's time-consuming to go through and determine whether something is valid or invalid. In some cases, an email says it's coming from within the company, perhaps somebody in our purchasing department. When another employee sees the name, they assume it's safe but in reality, it's a spoofed email address. People often don't feel like digging into it so they just look at the email, resulting in the introduction of a trojan, virus, or other malware.

The amount of time that it takes to deal with spam messages varies. It depends on the type of spam that is hitting the inbox. In the morning when you fire up your email program, a high-end user may spend 15 to 20 minutes going through stuff just to make sure it's valid or not valid.

Then, throughout the day, these people were getting spam messages. It eats your time, even with one or two here and there, because you're taking time to maybe open the message, then investigate if it's really coming from a valid address or not. Even if it only takes a minute to do one message, and you get 15 of those a day, that's 15 minutes of your time. That's quite valuable.

We have thousands of users so even if 2,000 of them get five spam messages a day, and it takes each one a minute to deal with, it's a lot of time.

Using SpamTitan has immensely improved our spam catch rate and reduced our false positive rate. In a five-year timeframe, it has blocked between 60 million and 70 million messages. 

The most valuable feature is the protection that it offers against spam, phishing, viruses, and other such attacks. That's the biggest benefit of the product.

We use the geo-blocking feature, which helps to reduce our spam intake. There are known locations that are notorious for sending spam, viruses, and so forth, which is one of the reasons we use it. Right now, our filter is blocking approximately 75% of the mail that hits our door. Only 26% of the mail we get actually passes.

We use the geo-blocking feature for restricting emails based on country, and it works well. However, if something does pass that is spam or a phishing attempt, then we may block by IP address if necessary. This is very important to our organization because spam email is bad, and it's a problem for us.

We are able to create exceptions based on a trusted sender's specific location or IP address, and it works fine for that. We don't have a large rule base and in most cases, the senders, who are typically customers or vendors that we deal with, do not have their email exchange set up properly. They don't have the proper checks in place, so we add exceptions for them.

The user interface is good, and it's pretty easy to use once you learn your way around. That said, there's a lot to it and it's in-depth. There are many aspects to the interface, and there are a lot of tabs.

Overall, in terms of the system's intuitiveness, it's okay. When you click on a tab for system settings, as an example, there are multiple tabs that you can drill down into from there. Sometimes, it can be a little bit difficult to find out where you want to go, just because there are many layers to the interface.

It is difficult to say how I might improve it. There are many pieces to it, and a lot of layers, but the way they have it set up is fine. Sometimes, however, you have to search around a little bit to find out where you want to go.

There are eight main tabs and once you click on one of those tabs, it takes you into another area where there can be up to eight or ten other things that you can click into. Then, when you get in there, it might be another six or eight areas that you can look at.

If you go into system setup, as an example, and then go to static routing for network configuration, that's three layers deep. You would probably figure that the network configuration is going to be in the system setup, so you would start there intuitively, but it's a lot of options.

One of the areas that can be improved is the GUI. The product works well but finding things in the interface can sometimes be a bit difficult, just because it's so in-depth and covers a lot.

We have been using TitanHQ SpamTitan for approximately five years.

This is a very stable product. We have not had any downtime and we have not had the product crash on us, where it was not filtering mail.

We have not rebooted our server for five years.

SpamTitan is easily scalable. If you give them more money, they'll give you more licenses.

We are a large company with many factories in Mexico, China, Vietnam, and several US cities. We have several thousand employees and in the past five years of using SpamTitan, we have blocked between 60 million and 70 million messages.

We have 100% adoption. Any email coming into our company has to go through this filter before it hits our Exchange server and then is distributed to the user community. 

The technical support is really good. I've had great luck with the support group out of Titan HQ. They are quick to respond and typically have a solution very quickly. If they don't, they'll dig into it and keep updating you as to where they're at in the process of finding a solution. Overall, I'm pleased with the support.

I would rate their support a nine out of ten. It's not a perfect rating because there is always that time when you don't get the exact answer you want, or they can't do exactly what you want. In any case, that could be a software update or something that has to be reprogrammed. They will send that up to development, but sometimes it takes time for that to happen.

If comparing support to other vendors, their response time is very quick. When you open a ticket, you get a response right away that they acknowledge that you've submitted a help desk ticket with them. Then typically you'll get a response from the tech at Titan HQ that has picked up the ticket.

They'll let you know either right then about a solution, or that they're investigating. Typically you will hear back, I would say normally within the hour, with a solution, or potential questions to help with a solution.

I would rate them above average as far as their response time and working through issues.

Positive

Prior to using SpamTitan, we were using the filtering that is part of our Microsoft Exchange.

It's quite easy to set up. There are a lot of defaults that are set up in how it functions and what it does. Then, as you start using the product more, you can get more in-depth and put more controls and filters in place. As far as initially setting it up, the process is pretty easy.

Having it easy to set up is always an important thing. The less time you have to spend configuring and setting up a product, the more time you have for doing other things.

From start to finish, we spent approximately one day getting it set up. The server was installed, the software was installed, and then we set up getting our mail routed through it.

After the initial setup, there is some programming and other things that you do over time. But, I wouldn't consider that as part of the installation process.

We did the implementation ourselves, with the help of Titan HQ. Our experience with them has been good. The products that they sell are typically good and easy to use, so you'll potentially put them into other locations or buy more licenses.

The deployment can be done with one person, and we have a couple of people on staff that take care of it. If there are issues with false positives or things of that nature, we've got a couple of people on staff that oversee it. That's not their only job; they're network administrators or systems admins and they have multiple tasks. That said, they have a couple of people that are familiar with the product and work on it.

Pricing is on par with other products, and it's reasonable. They have different categories as far as the size of your company and how they license it, which is good.

We evaluated three or four products at the time, although it was several years ago and I don't recall exactly which ones.

We preferred SpamTitan after looking at other customer reviews, talking with some references, and they just came out the winner as far as capabilities. Support is a big thing for anybody when it comes to dealing with a product, and it's important because you're potentially blocking viruses and other malware that could harm the company very badly.

My advice for anybody who is looking into implementing this product is to first go through their demo with them and make sure you understand how in-depth the product is because there's a lot to it. If the end-user wants a product that they plug in and turn on and they never have to look at it again, SpamTitan is not it.

This is an in-depth product and there are multiple ways to block things, although it is fairly plug-and-play with their default configuration. Other than just the actual configuration of IP addresses and things of that nature, there's a lot to it.

I know there are simpler options out there, but they also are not as comprehensive as what you can do with the product.

Overall, as far as the product goes and how it catches things, I'm quite happy with it. Ninety percent of the time, it does a great job. There is that 10% that sometimes you may want to try and do something with it, and it doesn't have the capability. That is pretty rare and when it happens, typically they will send that to development, and development will come up with a solution.

It may take a little time for them because I'm sure they have a huge backlog of things, but it's not like they tell you it's something they're not going to do. Instead, they'll send it to the development team and explain that there is an issue that the customer wants to be corrected or a capability that they want to have added. At that point, it will go up the chain within their organization.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use it to provide 100% spam protection for us as well as all of our clients. It is ultimately part of our layered security approach since not one thing can do it all. You need a lot of stuff. Therefore, they are a part of that solution.

The way that we are structured in our go-to-market strategy, this solution is part of a whole host of things. Though it is typically not the forerunner since spam is not a major forerunner, but if it is definitely a thing to be on the table, then they would be at the meetings and helping us to land deals. Security, in general, is typically something that is part of our go-to-market strategy. At that point, people want to hear about the layers of security and the fact that we have a spam filter and how that integrates with other components of monitoring their network.

Every company and person will experience spam differently because everyone interacts with accounts, emails, subscriptions, and websites much differently. From my perspective, for the five years we have been on it, I have never had a problem. I don't even know where those spam/ham buttons really are on my computer. It does exactly what I need. I don't say, "Oh. I didn't get that. Let me go check my spam." That doesn't really exist. I literally can think of one time in five years where I have said that. Then, the person sending me the email was sending a very spammy email from a mailing list type software. It was no wonder it got caught, and it was his fault. As far as the product goes, it is really good. I am sure some of our clients also don't understand how to articulate that. For them, they don't think it adds much. We do hear that noise and have to consider that as part of a product that we are going to have in our suite offering. As far as the false positives go, it is fairly solid.

In the last year, I had one company with whom we never do business. He is a painter who came to paint our office. He emailed an invoice and it went to my spam box. I texted him. I am like, "Hey, am I getting an invoice?" He was like, "I sent it." So, in a whole year, I have spent three minutes managing my spam, which is next to nothing.

SpamTitan’s geo-blocking feature helps allow us to block spam emails entering our network and servers, reducing our spam intake. We use this feature regularly because we have customers who have offices around the globe. Especially before COVID when it was safe to travel, people (from our customers) were always circumnavigating the globe. Being able to either turn it on for temporary usage or block it altogether, that versatility was a key feature that we needed. This feature is perfect for us. It gives us everything we need. Everything has been versatile enough for us in terms of allowing exceptions based on trusted vendors' ID, IP, domain, or email address.

I would rate the overall intuitiveness as eight out of 10. It is not that bad. There are just a few things. I don't know if it is a limitation of Microsoft or just a limitation of the design. There is a spam/ham button that they have. I love it, but it is not necessarily as intuitive. It is a bit tongue-in-cheek as far as a marketing ploy of good versus bad: fake being spam and good being ham. Most people who are already super self-conscious about their computers, knowledge, and skillset, they don't know what that means. To me, I love it. I think it is hilarious and clever, but I don't think it is that great for the intuitiveness of people who don't use it regularly. Those menus and options are buried in the ribbon on a separate add-in feature page versus where McAfee and other solutions used to bolt in right on your main email page. Anytime that you need to click two or three times to do something, that is always a pain in the ass. It would be nice if they had something where you could click right away in front of you and the buttons would be, "Mark as spam. Mark as good." Or, something like that, but it is their business decision.

The overall GUI is utilitarian. It has a spreadsheet feel versus a nice software that is guided. I am sure they're going to improve it over time. It could look a little prettier. It needs some lipstick. They should get rid of unfamiliar words like ham and spam, helping the user to better understand what they are clicking through.

For the couple of clients who have those unique needs that don't do business the way we do or have emails as clean as us, we have just turned off the actual spam quarantine boxes. I am finding that we are starting to do that more often, where the mail will just get forwarded through to junk with a subject line like, "***Spam****," and then the message. Having it quarantined and held in their online part makes it very tough to go check right away. You need to do multiple clicks plus sign-in. No one remembers their sign-in accounts. You need to go find an old email, which is just not great. 

If I want quarantine reports sent to me, then I get them all at 3:00 AM. As opposed to getting one sent to me every hour, then I can go check if there is something rather than delivering the malicious emails or spam. That would be something of improvement. It is just a better way to fine-tune or dial-in on reports.

Thousands of our customers really don't like the reports. They can't fine-tune or adjust when they get delivered. They have a lot of spam senders, e.g., newsletters, where they are expecting whomever they are dealing with to send them invoices, quotes, etc. This creates a whole bunch of flags of why it would be counted as spam. Logically, it all makes sense. They are not going to go buy a new ERP system for something like that. However, our customer is now super frustrated because they are now getting penalties on late payments or different things because the invoice went to their spam box.

It is easy to white label, but the damage was already done because they went and got a new vendor. They already did something else without us knowing, so there is no way to know that we have to white label it. We hear quite a bit of noise from our customers as far as just how they have to interact and manage spam.

We have been using it for more than five years.

The stability has been the same versus other security solutions that we have used. The solution is always, but so were the other solutions that I previously used.

Their services are awesome so we don't have a lot of problems with spam and viruses plaguing our customers. However, if and when something happens, they are phenomenal with their support who help and get involved. They don't make it our problem. I don't think they have ever said, "No," to us for anything.

Their tech support is awesome. When I was directly working with the techs, I would often reference SpamTitan's support as a way to parallel or mirror some of the things that we were trying to strengthen in our own support. I would rate them as nine out of 10 since there is always room for improvement.

I only hear about when things are not going very well or meeting our expected SLAs. I hear about other vendors, and it is like, "They suck. They never get back to us." I get the customer complaints about certain things, Microsoft being one of them, where things are not getting fixed and we are waiting on the vendor. Then, I have to get involved and talk to clients, give credits, etc. because Microsoft is taking forever. 

From my perspective, I know that SpamTitan has never been a problem for us or had those types of escalations. Therefore, they are performing very well.

Our tickets are usually done within an hour or less. This means we can work with the customer, reach out to a vendor, get support, and help the customer all within 60 minutes.

Positive

We first came to the solution because of an amazing sales guy named Marc Ludden at SpamTitan. I met him a long time ago. Since then, he has been promoted two or three times. I met him at a conference and we were just talking about their spam solution versus what we were currently doing. His charismatic approach and upfront promises of how things would be better seemed intriguing. For the price point, we were like, "Well, if this is even remotely close to what he is offering for this price, it is worth the risk to try them out." It was a bit of a, "Let's give this a go," and they have never let us down and we have never looked back.

Its savings for quality and service are hands-down the number one reason that we switched. I don't feel we have compromised any quality or service for our spam product. We went from using Barracuda, AppRiver, and McAfee. With TitanHQ's personable approach and boutique customer care, that is where we see a huge difference.

It is a very simple tool. Some of those other solutions are very complicated and convoluted to manage. Whereas, this is very simple and easy. It has afforded us a margin when it comes to, not just money, but the actual ability to manage a network through projects or disasters. 

The setup and configuration were super easy. Even if it was "difficult" as far as the complexity of what needed to get done, they helped. 

When you are new, they hold your hand as long and as much as you want. They did our first few deployments, then we finally said, "You know what? I think we have got this," and we started to tell them that we won't call them for deployments anymore, but they are always there to help and still are to this day. Even though we are not new, and every time we call them, there is never a thing they won't do for us.

Our pricing has pretty much stayed somewhat the same. Sure, there has been an increase or two that keeps up with inflation, but that is everybody. When we switched from AppRiver to SpamTitan, we saved about 20%. That is $1,000 to $2,000 a month. We went to SpamTitan and WebTitan. It was $1,000 savings a month for SpamTitan and another $1,500 a month savings for WebTitan.

Their superior service comes at a very cost-effective price. This is the biggest part that really allows us to remain competitive. Their pricing for us has just been great. They have helped us to be where we need to be. They really do partner with us in that way so we can get more business. They provide the right pricing, which lets us remain competitive. 

We have tried and tested Microsoft O365 spam filters, just native without any third-party, as well as the Clutter box. That was a nightmare. There is definitely a reason why third-party spam providers exist versus just using what is built into O365. SpamTitan is one of those reasons.

Customers almost don't care which spam filter it is. Almost, because it sometimes does come up, and they will say, "Who are you using?" However, we typically don't even get, "Who are you using?" Usually, if that person is technical at that other organization, that is when they're just curious. Typically, people don't even ask us what type of tools we are bringing. They just want the end result recipe of a calm network.

The geo-blocking feature is important for us. Though, it is hard to always get it perfect. That is for any provider with geofencing because you don't always get control over where Internet traffic flows from or through, or where they are running from. IPs are a little bit better, but we don't always know what hotel people are in.

They are very good. I would rate them as 10 out of 10 because there is always room for improvement.

Our primary use case is as a secure email gateway; the solution scans our emails for spam and viruses and does URL link rewriting. SpamTitan makes sure our incoming and outgoing emails don't contain anything problematic.

Before implementing the solution, I had 13,000 to 14,000 sitting in my Deleted Items folder on 90 day rolling average. The figure after implementing SpamTitan is 8,000 to 9,000 items in my Deleted Items folder on a 90 day rolling average, so it's stopping thousands of emails that got through before.

We are part of a larger University organization, and many spam emails come from the broader organization. They run Office 365, and there is spam it doesn't catch, despite user reporting. SpamTitan filters out the emails Office 365 misses, for the most part, as no solution is 100% effective all the time.

SpamTitan is flexible and highly configurable. 

The solution keeps a copy of inbound and outbound messages for a period, which is a handy feature. It makes it easier to determine precisely what is happening with an email, where it came from, why it isn't routing correctly, why it is or isn't being flagged etc. If an end user forwards us a problematic email, the header information can be lost, making it harder to figure out what's happening.

Geo-blocking is a great feature. It's simple, and it works; we pick a country, and the tool blocks mail from that country. There isn't a list of countries to select from, we have to type in the country name, and it brings up matches, which is a little cumbersome, but it still works quite well. The feature is good to have, but we don't see a massive influx of emails being blocked. 

A huge feature for us is the link rewriting configuration; we can set exemptions for link rewriting from particular organizations. The rest are rewritten and checked against the SpamTitan database of problematic sites and email sources. The user is notified of the outcome of the check, which is excellent when it's hard to determine if an email is legitimate or not.   

The solution saves employees' time. Many of our faculty are physicians who don't have much time to check their emails, especially if they need to scroll through and delete spam mail, which can hide important messages. A cleaner inbox is easier to use and saves time, probably an hour a week per user. That might not sound like much, but we had physicians with inboxes so full of spam they stopped checking their emails, which is no longer the case. Our catch rate is up significantly, and our false positives have dropped considerably, saving the end user time.

The interface needs to be improved; some elements aren't where I expect them to be, so it could be more intuitive. 

The solution isn't intuitive enough for me to go in and write specific rules and exemptions.

We have been using the solution for about nine months. 

The stability is excellent. We filter 45,000 to 50,000 emails a week through the solution and haven't had any server issues. Physically rebooting the primary server causes a failure to the backup server, which is how it is supposed to work, the stability is solid.

The solution is highly scalable and easy to scale. The appliances are straightforward to get up and running and to add to the system. A few clicks and checks are all that's required.

The customer service is outstanding. If I have a question, I can open a ticket, and they usually get back to me within hours. They can also remote in if I turn on remote access, so they can fix what needs to be fixed or tell us what we need to do to resolve our issue. Their support is fantastic.

I can send TitanHQ a ticket with the information of a rule that requires updating and provide them remote access to our system via a code. Usually, within 24 hours, their rule post developer will have come in and provided a solution for us, which is incredible.

Positive

We previously used GFI MailEssentials, but it wasn't being updated. It was almost two years since their last update. They updated their filters and virus database regarding the software, but that's it. We saw an increase in spam getting through, and my team and I spent more time releasing false positives. GFI didn't work well in our multi-exchange server environment and didn't perform as we expected.

We looked for another solution, did a POC with SpamTitan, found it impressive and decided to implement it. One of our requirements was an on-prem option due to HIPPA regulations regarding information sharing, which narrowed the selection down. Another requirement was a solution that sits in front of the email as a gateway. This further limited the selection, and SpamTitan was the natural choice.

The deployment is very straightforward. TitanHQ provided a knowledgeable staff member to support our deployment, and it was clear he was very experienced and wonderful to work with. He was patient and made an excellent first impression. The initial setup required two people, myself and the staff member from TitanHQ, and it didn't take long. We set up two appliances and a failover solution, which we did over three separate meetings of an hour each during the first month of the POC. By the end of the month, I was ready to purchase, and no further setup was required.

The solution is very lightweight in terms of maintenance, we've had one major update over nine months, and that was a click of a button to download and install. We can set updates to auto-install, and the minor updates, including antivirus definitions, happen by themselves. TitanHQ puts a lot of effort into maintaining SpamTitan on their end.

I don't have any precise numbers, but I would say the product provides an ROI. An intangible ROI is decreasing the footprint for a phishing or some sort of email related security attack.  By doing such a good job of weeding out the bad messages we reduce the number of potentially harmful messages making it to the users inbox.  We train our users on how to spot spam messages, but that is not full proof.  By significantly catching more spam messages and rewriting the hyperlinks this has further reduced the chances of someone mistakenly interacting with a bad message.  Thus increasing our security foot print.

The pricing is very reasonable. I know the cloud version costs more because of active 24/7 monitoring, but we take care of that as our setup is on-prem. SpamTitan is in line with what we were paying for GFI MailEssentials but works much better.

I don't remember what other solutions I considered. The person I worked with from TitanHQ was fantastic; they helped me with the POC and any information and advice I needed. That was one of the main reasons I didn't dig much further into other solutions.

I would rate SpamTitan a nine out of ten. 

Typically, we don't see large amounts of spam stopped by geo-blocking, but we have the feature activated for a few countries, the major players. 

We don't use the geo-blocking exemptions feature because we block the whole country at this point; we don't have business dealings with other countries.

SpamTitan is an excellent product; the only issue is with the UI, which is somewhat dated. TitanHQ is working on updating it, however. I would advise users not to be discouraged by the UI because the solution works well; it's a solid option.

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.

TitanHq host the solution and I subscribe to it. I forward our email to them and use them as an incoming and outgoing email gateway.

I now get hardly any spam. I run a small email and web hosting business with about 30 clients. They were always complaining that the proprietary spam systems that I had weren't working, and we were always chasing our tail trying to clean it up. People who are involved with email know that most spam comes from people who indiscriminately sign up to email newsletters and the like. But user behavior is difficult to change. The old system that I had, the native system on the email server, with a couple of plugins that were involved, was just not doing it. It was fairly effective, but I was still getting lots of spam. Now, that is basically gone. 

When TitanHQ first approached me, they told me that with SpamTitan our spam would disappear. And they're absolutely right. It has. And not at the expense of genuine emails either. It really has changed the whole spam issue. I get no customer complaints about spam anymore from those people who have signed up with my organization.

Before I started using SpamTitan, my spam system was quarantining about 800 emails per day, and a lot more were getting through. Now, my spam system quarantines maybe two or three per day. That's how effective it is. My own spam system isn't really being deployed because everything that comes into the server has already been cleaned sufficiently. That means the SpamAssassin that I use along with the email server really doesn't have to deploy at all, which has a positive effect on server and its CPU load. The email server is able to be in the business of relaying email, as opposed to checking everything and having to put things in spam folders and quarantine folders.

Another really excellent benefit, and this is not client-dependent, is that all outgoing email is now checked for spam. That means I have an extra security check on what happens on the server. There are between 300 and 400 email boxes on my server, and it only takes one person to be sloppy with their login details and somebody can be using the box to relay email. Just yesterday, there was an example of that. SpamTitan caught it and stopped about 300 emails from going out. That was a bonus because I wasn't expecting to have outgoing emails covered as well, but they are.

The fact that it does exactly what it says on the box is what I find most valuable about SpamTitan. They've reduced our spam by about 99 percent.

SpamTitan is not particularly configurable. I basically have to accept their parameters for a lot of things.

There are also delivery limits, something like five emails per minute per mailbox. They do that, they say, because they want to maintain compliance, but I can't configure that. I can't be more aggressive about that if I want to be. 

Another example is that I have a couple of clients that send out membership emails, and that causes some problems because we're not able to configure SpamTitan to enable those emails to go smoothly. I have to do a work-around at our end for that.

There are a lot of parameters that, if I want changed, I've got to ask them to make the changes. In short, I'd like them to make it more configurable. To be fair, it's a small price to pay for what they're doing for us, but a bit more ability to configure limits would be good.

I've been using TitanHQ SpamTitan for between six and eight weeks.

The stability seems to be absolutely spot-on. There are backup and redundancy strategies involved. If one server is down, there's another one available. I have never been aware of the backup MX record having to be used.

The proof in the pudding is really our customers' feedback because, had there been any problems in terms of stability, I would have heard about it from our own customers. We've had no complaints. The only thing I have heard from our customers is, "Thanks for doing whatever it was that you did." I have managed to take the credit for what SpamTitan is doing for our clients. There have been no issues at all in terms of stability or reliability.

I'm offering the incoming mail spam prevention as a premium add-on to what I offer to my clients. I have four or five clients that are up and running with it, and another three are on a trial. But for the price point that I'm at with SpamTitan, I could probably take on another 15 clients very easily. Our business is very small in volume in terms of what a company like SpamTitan are dealing with. I don't envisage any problems with scalability, even I were to double over the next year.

At the moment, for outgoing email the solution is monitoring about 300 email boxes, and for incoming email, about 50. If more of my clients sign up for the premium offering that I've suggested to them, to cut down on their spam even further, I would like to expand usage of it. I'd like to sell it to all my current clients.

I'm still learning about what they have to offer. We're using SpamTitan as a blunt tool to stop spam, but there are so many other things that are on offer. I have probably only scratched the surface. I haven't really spoken to anyone at length yet, other than the salespeople, about the other things that are on offer, because of time constraints on my part.

In terms of getting to a resolution, and in terms of professionalism, TitanHQ support is first-class. They're not very user-friendly, but I can deal with that. That's a common thing in the IT business. But they are professional and efficient.

SpamTitan is the first external email gateway that I've ever used, so I can't compare their support with its competitors. I could compare it with a payment gateway, like Worldpay for instance, which I use for one of my clients. Worldpay has a great offering, but their technical support is a bit brusk and monosyllabic and not always very helpful. Compared to Worldpay, SpamTitan are much better, with the caveat that, as I noted, SpamTitan aren't all that user-friendly. Sometimes IT people can appear as if they're being put out a bit when you ask them questions about the product. I can live with that. At the end of the day, as long as they provide a resolution, I'm cool.

Positive

The setup and ease of use are an eight out of 10, where 10 is easiest. They set up most of it for us. I had to do some work at our end on DNS and it was sorted. That was easy enough.

There's a wee learning curve to the user interface but it's easily negotiated, and once you understand it, then it's fairly straightforward. I would rate the overall intuitiveness of the solution at seven or eight out of 10.

Part of the reason that there was some difficulty for me at the very beginning was that I didn't quite understand how the product worked. At that time I was really only interested in the end results. One phone call got that sorted out. When I started to understand how it worked, it made it so much easier for me to understand how the configuration was put together.

I did a trial that was supposed to last for a month, but I signed up after a week because it was working so well. Getting it set up was fairly time-consuming because each domain that was added to SpamTitan involved tedious work with the DNS. But the setup on the SpamTitan side was relatively easy and very quick to deploy.

What it is doing for us at the moment is more than value for the money that I pay. I've already recouped the cost of the solution from my customers who have signed up for it. 

It's a no-brainer for me. It has 

• given me less work to do
• knocked down the number of support calls
• totally eradicated support calls for spam.

And the net cost at the moment is absolutely nothing. I do realize that the cost will go up if more of my clients sign up for it. It's not something I'm looking to turn a profit on. Still, financially, it has already helped the business because we've got more time to devote to other things since we're not putting out spam fires constantly as we did before.

If all of my clients were to sign up for it, it would be worth about £5,000 pounds a year in extra income for me.

As a small business, every penny is counted here. All businesses have had problems over the past couple of years with the pandemic. I really thought that something like SpamTitan would be more expensive, but it cost me about $70 (or about £60) a month. I'm more than happy to pay that.

I looked into other solutions, but most of them were in-server, a piece of software that I would have to buy a license for. I would have to be responsible for the configuration of them as well, which would mean upskilling on my part and my employee's part. One of the other solutions I looked at was a fairly big multinational company. The thing that got me into SpamTitan was that they cold-called me. That gave me the thought that, "Oh, there are cloud solutions like that out there. Let me have a look to see what they are."

After having done a bit of research and due diligence on SpamTitan, I went to the SpamTitan website and found out that, with two clicks, I could set up a trial so that's what I did. I couldn't do that with the competitors. I was getting it for free for a month to try it on a couple of domains. They were quite happy to extend that if I required an extension, as I was learning how to cope with the system. They were very confident that it would work and, in fact, it did. 

I didn't do as much research as I might have done otherwise because I wasn't thinking that it was a mission-critical thing. It was just a thought at the time that something like that would be a bit of a luxury. It would cost me some money but might be quite useful. I have since found it to be far more useful than that.

My advice is go for it. Absolutely. I really have no hesitation saying that at all. With a lot of software solutions it's usually "horses for courses." How they work depends on your workflow. But with SpamTitan, it's absolutely a binary situation. There are no ifs or buts. It stops the spam coming through and it's amazing.

This sounds hyperbolic, but it's easily the best purchase that I've made since I started this business, 15 or 16 years ago.

I have paid for things, and sometimes I think they're a waste of cash but I'll keep them in place because there might be some small convenience involved, but this solution is really well worth it. I really was pinching myself at the beginning and wondered, "Is it really going to be that effective?" So far—and it has only been six weeks, so there's always that caveat; maybe there is some disaster that's ready to befall me down the line somewhere—honestly, it's just been superb.

It's definitely a 10 out of 10. I have some issues with the technical support, but when it comes to spam detection it would either be a zero or a 10 for me. It hasn't reduced my spam by half—even that may well have been worth the money that I pay for it. Rather, it has cut it out altogether.

The only spam that I get now, doesn't go through SpamTitan. There are some fairly clever spammers who manage to email directly and bypass SpamTitan, but I very seldom get spam. What I do get all seems to come from New Zealand, strangely, and not from the usual suspects, like the Far East or Russia. It's very much in the Southern hemisphere. But what I do get is minimal.

SpamTitan has an anti-spam solution, but it's basic and doesn't work all the time. It also has an antivirus feature, which is similarly basic. It doesn't offer anything exceptional. It offers only the basics. 

OnlyMyEmail was far superior. I'm not sure who acquired their technology when they went bankrupt.

It filters some of the spam.

SpamTitan advertises anti-spam, anti-phishing, and anti-spear phishing, but it's mostly marketing. They really only do basic anti-spam, nothing more.

It's less secure with a lot more spam and false positives than my previous product, OnlyMyEmail.

So, there's room for improvement with SpamTitan. It filters some of the spam. But honestly, I could get 90% of the same results by updating my Bayesian filters on my server, which are free.

I used it for two and a half years. 

I contacted support only when it came time to renew and collect payment.

contacted them once or twice, if I remember correctly. I just know they're quick when they need your money.

I was previously a satisfied customer of OnlyMyEmail. Unfortunately, they had a significant technical failure and couldn't provide security for a week, causing them to lose their biggest client. That's when I switched to Bitdefender for email security.

I used Bitdefender. But it didn't meet my needs. I used it for two years. Its technology was far inferior to OnlyMyEmail. I also looked into Censornet. However, I eventually obtained a server license for SpamTitan.

Currently, I am one of the slightly happy. customer of SpamTitan. It works when it wants to, it doesn't want, it doesn't work. 

The main difference between SpamTitan and OnlyMyEmail was accuracy. I never saw false positives with OnlyMyEmail in the ten years I used it. It just worked as it should, and at a very low price. I'm not sure what technology they used, but it was excellent.

I was paying around one dollar and something cents per email address per month.

It's a server license, so someone else installed it for me. As for SpamTitan's interface, it looks like Windows 95 – very outdated. It has basic functionality, just like the service. They have great marketing, but they only deliver the basics.

So, there's room for improvement across the board. 

I have my own email server. SpamTitan is installed on a separate server in Frankfurt. It handles the spam filtering and security, then emails are delivered to the server I have on-premises in Romania.

I also have a firewall with basic spam filtering and ESET antivirus, which also has an anti-spam feature. They function independently. Surprisingly, some spam that gets through SpamTitan is picked up by my ESET antivirus.

The technician who installed it is my friend, and he never mentioned it being difficult.

It was up and running within a day or two. 

It's more expensive than my old solution, OnlyMyEmail. That's surprising because SpamTitan requires a minimum of 50 user licenses. As a small customer, I only need about 25  real users.

With OnlyMyEmail, I had a perfect solution at a cheaper price. I'd gladly pay more than I do for SpamTitan if it meant having the same reliable functionality that worked 100% of the time.

I pay $650 per year for 50 licenses. 

If there's something better, I'd gladly switch. Unfortunately, I haven't researched alternatives in the past three years, so I don't know if anything significantly better exists.

Overall, I would rate the solution a seven out of ten.