What is our primary use case?
Within our company umbrella, there are three companies under us, with everything from sales to marketing to customer interaction, both inbound and outbound. Anytime that we receive any type of email, it gets filtered through SpamTitan.
The way that we have it set up is to filter keywords, in addition to its artificial learning capabilities. If something looks like it was written by a human, it will allow it to pass through, unless it throws some kind of flag that something looks suspicious. In general, it simply routes emails to our employees, giving us warnings if there is anything suspicious that we need to know about before those emails actually are received.
We use the cloud version of the solution, we don't have an onsite server. We have multiple companies within my company, but we've set them all up to route through SpamTitan.
How has it helped my organization?
We started with SpamTitan a couple of months after I started with this company. Up until then, we didn't have a spam filter solution. All the junk marketing emails would make it to every single person's inbox. People were having to filter through all the junk while also trying to find and respond to emails from customers in a decent amount of time. They were getting more spam and fake emails with malicious attachments than actual customer emails. The amount of time that everybody was spending just deleting junk and trying to actually find customer emails was excessive.
Since starting with SpamTitan, though, we hardly ever have any emails that were malicious or that were from random domains that are known to be used for spam. Anything that comes through that it thinks is malicious, but it's not 100 percent sure, will be placed in quarantine for each user. It will give them a daily, automatic report saying, "We have these in quarantine. If they look good to you, you can release them, and you'll immediately get them in your inbox."
As a result, we do not have to delete all the spam from our inboxes. It allows us to only see the most important ones that are questionable, so we're not digging through hundreds of emails a day from junk addresses. When compared to before we got SpamTitan three and a half years ago, hours a week are now being saved for every single employee. They no longer have to dig through junk. At the end of 2021, when I ran our yearly report, it automatically blocked over 250,000 bad emails that weren't from customers or had malicious attachments.
If we saved, say, 30 seconds for every one of those 250,000 emails that were stopped, we saved that much time, minimum. Our inboxes don't reach capacity from the junk that should have never reached us to begin with. As a company, we've saved so much money by not having to spend time dealing with that.
The geo-blocking feature definitely reduces our spam intake. The last time that I checked just geo-IP blocking, we had about 12,000 emails that attempted to come through in the last six months and were immediately stopped. They were stopped because we don't do business with them or have any connections with them.
What is most valuable?
The filter rules are valuable. The software itself will automatically filter out things that it thinks are suspicious. However, the filter rules are the most helpful because, if we need to, we can block entire domains and subdomains with the click of a button. In addition, if one specific email address is a problem, but not the entire domain, we can drill down and specifically block it without affecting anyone else in that domain.
They also have something called Pattern Filtering, which has been a godsend. While the software can only do so much, as far as detecting things that look suspicious based on what it's seen from all of its users, with Pattern Filtering I can use my own terminology or search terms. For example, if I don't want any email to ever come through that has the term "hot dog" in it, whether it be in the subject, the title, or anywhere else, I can immediately block such emails, company-wide. That has saved me so much time. It also works for blocking specific document types or file types. All it takes on my end is going into the Pattern Filtering and selecting what I don't want to come through or what I want to go into quarantine, to warn me first before we allow it through. It's one of the most helpful, but also one of the easiest-to-use features, that does the most for our company. It has saved me hours of work a month when it comes to filtering out all the new stuff that keeps coming in from different countries and scammers.
When we started, geo-blocking wasn't a feature but they added it within the last two years. I also do a lot of network security for our company. If there is a specific country that we don't do business with and from which we're getting a lot of requests, or if we have multiple attacks coming in a specific country, or if we keep getting a lot of emails from the same IP subnet from a certain country, instead of having to block every single new IP that comes in from that country, I can literally just block the country and any IP that tries to send us mail is immediately stopped, which is fantastic.
Those features are the ones we use the most, and they're also the most helpful for filtering out the most junk. And a lot of that is done automatically, once it starts detecting our blocking patterns and the stuff we aren't allowing to come through. With the subset of those things that do actually get through, because the senders either found better ways to mask what they're trying to do or they're sending stuff from different IPs that weren't blocked originally, I can just go into the solution and block them. Including login time and getting to the screen, I could have an IP address or an entire country blocked in less than two minutes.
In addition, the UI is not extremely flashy, which is fine for the people who need to be in the online console and determine what gets blocked and what gets released. It's very straightforward without animations or graphics. It has tabs that you click on that say, "If you click here, this is what you're dealing with." The usability is fantastic. It doesn't give me more than I need so I don't have to drill down through 20 different windows before I get to what I want. I actually appreciate the fact that it's as simple as it is.
Another good feature is that you can see how much is being blocked based on date ranges.
What needs improvement?
The only thing that threw me off a little bit, when it first came out, was Pattern Filtering. There didn't seem to be a huge amount of documentation on how to properly use it. If you want to block the term "hot dog," it's pretty straightforward. You just select, "If the email contains this phrase, block it for everyone."
But, if you want to block an email address with .com.biz, which seems like it's legit but that .biz at the end throws it off, you have to get a little more detailed regarding how you type out what the Pattern Filtering feature looks for. You can't just enter ".com.biz" because it will then block everything that has .com or .biz in it. It takes a little more regex coding.
If they had a little more documentation explaining how to use regex, or if they could include that inside of the cloud interface so that it generates regex code based on the parameters you input, that would be a lot more useful for people who aren't familiar with coding languages and HTML. When you use it for a while, you get used to it, and you understand what it is that the pattern filter is looking for, but a regular user who doesn't know anything about regex has to learn what it is which can be a little daunting for people completely unfamiliar with the concept.
Buyer's Guide
TitanHQ SpamTitan
October 2024
Learn what your peers think about TitanHQ SpamTitan. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: October 2024.
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For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using TitanHQ SpamTitan for three and a half years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I have never once had an issue where the software went down or stopped routing our emails. There has never once been an occasion where TitanHQ has said, "We're going to do maintenance," or "We're not going to be able to route your emails." In two and a half years, it's never stopped working once, not even for five minutes. It's one of the most stable solutions that we use, company-wide.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Scaling is extremely simple. When we started, they asked us how many users we would have. SpamTitan detects whether we are under that number of users. But it has never stopped us. We once went over the number of licensed users. We talked to them and said, "We added new employees, we need to up our license," and they did that instantly. There was no waiting and we didn't have to go through renewing the contract. We didn't have to change any settings and we didn't have to reroute anything again. They added more users and it just kept working. Scaling is super-easy, and the solution can accommodate as many people as you need.
With all of our sub-companies, we have about 150 users of the solution.
We use it literally every day for filtering everything. The cool thing about it is that once it's set up and it's running the way you need it to, you hardly even need to log in, unless somebody tried to send an email and it didn't show up immediately. If that email didn't hit the spam filter, then you just have to tell whoever sent the email to try again. Other than that, it just works.
In the future, if we open more locations or we hire new employees, we'll absolutely increase how many users are using the software because it's invaluable to us.
How are customer service and support?
I come from an MSP background. I took over the director of IT role in this company when I started here. With companies that I used in the past, if there was an issue with something that was not set up right or it was not filtering correctly, you would have to either submit a ticket or call. You would wait on hold and hope that the rep who talks to you is either knowledgeable enough to help you or wait again to be transferred to tier-one, two, or three support, until somebody was able to solve the problem.
The best thing about support with SpamTitan is that if I have an issue and I email them, I will normally get a response in 30 minutes if it's not a serious problem. But if I call them—and I have never had a company do this before—I always seem to talk to the same people; not the team, but literally the same people every time. If I had a problem a couple months ago, and then I have a new problem, I'm talking to the same person that I spoke with months ago, and they're familiar with what's happened in the past and they remember my setup. It seems like the most personalized software support that I've ever experienced. I'm not constantly worried that I'm going to have somebody who isn't able to help me when I call. With TitanHQ, the person I call and talk to is the person that is solving my problem, every single time.
It honestly feels like the people who are helping me either use the software themselves, and have from the beginning, or they helped engineer and develop the software. They're able to fix my problem in minutes, versus several phone calls or having to worry about getting transferred around. That's awesome.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
In a previous job, the company I worked for used Barracuda. That was an onsite spam filtering service. It was fine, although it took a lot more setup and a lot more hands-on work to get it to work the way that I needed it to. If there ever was a problem, either with the hardware or software updates, I would have to call somebody in support who knows what they're doing or wait for somebody to give me a callback and help me fix the problem. In a business, when you have people sending you contracts or sales orders and invoices and there's a problem that is stopping email from coming through, if you can't get help immediately and you lose those emails, it really hurts your company. I had issues like that with Barracuda.
Before Barracuda, we had something that was used to help filter spam and has since become Cisco hardware. It almost feels like the companies were too big to give customers personalized support when they needed it. It was as if they had grown beyond what their support teams could handle. With SpamTitan, I've never once had the feeling that they're taking on more than they can handle.
We looked at Barracuda and Cisco and went through a few demos. Believe it or not, we actually found SpamTitan through Reddit, via several IT channels that I was a member of. Somebody from TitanHQ answered a lot of my questions through Reddit and offered us a demo. We did the demo and it did everything we needed it to do, without a ton of input from us or having to spend days to get it set up and working. The fact that it worked out-of-the-box, meant we went directly from the demo to signing on with the company. We've loved it ever since.
The demo setup that we had tried to do before SpamTitan was insane. We did less to get everything working with SpamTitan than we did with all of these other companies' spam filtering demos. Demos are supposed to be easy and attract customers. You want to show people that your stuff works with the easiest onboarding possible. The only company that was able to do that and show us that their solution worked without a setup headache was SpamTitan. That's why we stuck with them.
How was the initial setup?
It's one of the easiest setups that we've ever done. We just set our mail to route through SpamTitan and it auto-detected our email addresses. That's all it took. The software took care of everything else for us. There was no complicated setup. Our domain goes through the solution first. It detects the users that we have, sets them all up separately, and filters from there. We set up how strict we wanted it to be and let it learn over the first month. We manage everything through their website.
From the time that we were told to change where our mail is routed to, until it was actually successfully routing our emails to SpamTitan, it took about five minutes to set up.
Because we were unfamiliar with the software, we waited until our company was closed, and we weren't expecting any emails, to implement it. We did it on a weekend when we don't get a lot of customer emails. I spoke with somebody from SpamTitan and they told me where I needed to change our routing to. We logged into our domain, changed our MX record to route to SpamTitan, and everything else just took care of itself after that.
When we first started, there was a test mode and it would ask me, as the administrator, what was okay to let through. It would learn, based on my preferences, what it is that we were looking to block. After that first month of using SpamTitan, we now get a maximum of three false positives, company-wide, a week. Most of the time, the ones that get caught in the quarantine but that should have come through have a PDF attached or something has a really sketchy name, like a bunch of numbers, or it has "exe", even if it's not a .exe file but has the word "executive". But it lets us know that it was flagged so that way we have the ability to release it.
What was our ROI?
Not having to completely recover the company from a malware attack or from something that came in through email, and not having to worry about employees clicking on malicious links, are themselves, aspects of a return on investment. One malicious email with a bad attachment, or with a link that leads to a bad attachment, is enough to take an entire network down.
Also, the fact that our firewall hasn't been working as hard since we got the spam filter, speaks for itself regarding how valuable the software is.
If one software implementation can stop 90 percent of the problems in a company, when it comes to malware and malicious actors; if it can do that much and take the workload off of everything else in the company, then it's worth it a million times over.
And the time that we all save not having to dig through all the junk or worrying about whether we are going to click on something we shouldn't click on allows all of us to focus more on our actual tasks. We don't have to devote so much of our day to digging through and deleting junk emails, just to get to the stuff we actually need to do our jobs. That is also return on our investment. The amount of time SpamTitan has saved us is definitely worth it.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
When we started with this company they had fewer features. Neither the geo-IP blocking was available, nor was the Pattern Blocking. But throughout the three and a half years that we've been with them, they've added them, and they have not increased our cost. They've not even asked us to sign on for additional features. They just added them to their product and they were available for us to use. Having the same costs that we've been paying and having new features added is awesome. They give you an update without charging you more for it. I like that a lot. It makes you feel appreciated as a customer.
What other advice do I have?
If you're considering SpamTitan, get a feel for the software during the demo that they offer. If there is anything that you're not 100 percent certain about in terms of how it works or what its function is, call the support people and they'll explain it to you and make sure that you understand what it's supposed to do and how it works. That will let you know that the support people are there to help you, but it also makes sure that you understand the software that you're considering paying for. The demo will show you how much their software is actually able to do, while asking questions of their support staff will also show you how attentive and personal the support is. That way, you're getting the most out of determining if you want to actually use the software.
Lean on the support staff, because that's what they're there for. They will let you know that if you need anything, they're always there to help, no matter how small or big the question or problem might be.
The biggest lesson I've learned from using the solution is that I should have gotten it a lot sooner. The sooner you use the solution, the more time you'll have for everything else in your company.
Given all the spam filters that I've used, this is by far the easiest to use and the most detailed. At least give it a try, before you make a decision.
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.