TitanHQ SpamTitan Reviews

We are a support service provider here in Israel, and we have 200 to 300 clients. We use SpamTitan for a service that we give to our clients, which includes those who have Office 365 and those who have the on-prem Exchange service.

It has reduced the risk of getting viruses from emails by almost a hundred percent. We are giving services to hundreds of companies, and it makes our work a lot easier when SpamTitan is filtering threats. About two or three years ago, there was a ransomware or virus attack in Israel, and all the customers who were on SpamTitan were safe. They were free from that risk. A lot of customers who didn't have SpamTitan were impacted by the attack.

It saves time. When you properly fine-tune it for your needs, there are almost no calls about the service. It's constantly working and pretty much accurate in filtering emails. It's about 99% accurate. We have customers using Microsoft 365. When they moved to Microsoft 365 the last year, they decided not to pay for this service, but it blocks better. It works better than Microsoft 365. They have some spam emails passing through Microsoft Defender or Microsoft 365 protection.

We use the geo-blocking feature. In Israel, we get a lot of threats from all over the world, and we are not using all the domains. We are filtering more than a hundred domains, but we also have companies or customers who work with other countries, and they do want to accept emails from everybody, such as Brazil, Amsterdam, etc. We offer it as a service. If they want me to block emails from certain countries, we do that. When this feature is on, it does help. It works as expected. I never had a customer complaining that we used some geo-blocking filter, but they still got emails. So, it does help.

The system in general has some advantages in terms of the way it works. They describe it as having 99.9% success in catching spam, viruses, and other things, which is quite true. I like the way it works. 

First of all, it has two tests for the email or the connection that comes. The first one is whether it's in a blacklist or an SPF record, which helps determine if it will allow the sender to continue and insert the email into the system. It does fast tests from my point of view, and it almost filters 50% more junk email, and if it's a blacklist, it works 100% from my point of view. It blocks the messages that fail the SPF test. SPF is a standard policy framework that tells the recipient server whether the sender is authorized to send an email for that domain. If some devices or PCs are not allowed to send emails for that specific domain, it already blocks that, which saves a lot of hassle and a lot of pressure on the server. The content filter comes in the second stage, which means the email was approved in the first stage. The content filter does a couple of tests through the anti-spam engine and the antivirus engine. It also has a sandbox. If the email has an attachment, it opens the attachment in the sandbox to decide whether it's a virus or not or whether it's a threat or not.

It has two antivirus engines: ClamAV and Bitdefender. It has the OCR technology or the content filter to identify familiar words or hazardous links inside the content. It has link locks and all kinds of features. I have tuned off some of the settings because the tests that it's currently doing are good enough for me. For my usage, it's at the right level for getting the email safely without being hassled by customers for releasing email in quarantine, etc. There are certain levels that you want to reach. First, you want the mailbox to be safe, and second, as a provider, you want a lesser number of service calls. So, you need to adjust the setting and fine-tune the filter engines at a level where the service calls are logical and acceptable. Otherwise, you would find yourself hustling with hundreds of customers because they don't understand why something is being blocked. Doing mail forensics is quite complicated, and nobody likes it. So, in that way, the system is very good. It provides nice fine-tuning options.

It should have reporting capability. It has logs, which are very extensive. It catches all the SMTP connections to the servers, but when you have hundreds of domains, you need to wait for about an hour for the logs to open, and there are millions of lines. If you want to find something specific, such as an email coming or an IP connection, and you want to troubleshoot that, it's very hard. So, I would recommend building a reporting system or log viewer with some filters. Currently, it is everything or nothing.

The queue management could be better. If you are under attack and you get thousands or hundreds of emails, you can't control the queue. You need to call them, and they delete the garbage from the queue behind the scene. Otherwise, your server will be blocked.

I have been using this solution for 14 years.

It's very reliable. We have been working with it for almost 14 years. I can count on one hand the number of times we have had any problems with the system. Usually, the problems are related to cleaning the queue, but when it comes to technical problems, that has happened only five times in 14 years. It's very good.

It can grow. You can add more servers to the cluster. You can move to the cloud, or you can have a mixed setup. It's very scalable.

We are a quite large company that gives support to a few hundred customers. We have two servers in a cluster. So, it's a cluster environment. We have a top supporter that has access to top-level management. We have domain management users who have only access to domain-level management, and of course, each user can manage his own mailbox or his own setting. There are three layers of management in SpamTitan.

I have contacted them many times. I would rate them a 9 out of 10.

Positive

We used Atera in 2009 or 2010. We had their service. It was nothing compared to SpamTitan, but that was about 14 years ago.

I deployed it. It was straightforward, and it didn't take me long. It worked pretty fast. It was a fast process. In terms of the setup, the servers are in our hosting farm. They are not in the cloud. They are on-prem.

It's easy to use. Setting it up required a bit of figuring out the terminology and what they meant by what was written out there. Nowadays, they have improved that. Each section has a help option or information explaining what it does, what the setting is all about, and what to choose in case you want to change it, but it wasn't like this in the beginning.

In terms of maintenance, they provide system updates once in six months. The rest of the engines, such as the antivirus engine and the anti-spam engine, get updated hourly. They need updated signatures. They are updated automatically almost hourly, and it's done in the background without any disturbance.

It's easy to sell once the price is okay. It's easy to make deals. There is an ROI.

Compared to the market, its price is fair.

I remember a new version of Atera was coming out. I tested that, and I tested Cisco IronPort. I probably also played around with Barracuda, but SpamTitan was very easy to use and manage. It took me two hours to learn the whole system. It was very fast to set up.

I would recommend it depending on an end user's needs from the system because not all of them want the same thing. However, the system is straightforward, and it's filtering emails.

I would rate it a 10 out of 10. It's very good. It's one of the best.

I'm the owner of a managed service provider. SpamTitan provides a front end for Office 365 for some of my customers. About three years ago, some of my clients came under an email attack, so I deployed an email filter from Barracuda. We used that for a few years before switching to SpamTitan. 

We offer SpamTitan as a solution to those who need it. I don't think everybody needs it. Office 365 does a decent job of filtering spam, but SpamTitan is easier to use and probably performs better for customers with significant spam problems. It's a 100% cloud solution, but it's not like we deploy it to AWS or Azure and integrate it into their cloud or anything. It's a turnkey solution.

As a TitanHQ partner, we reap some financial benefits from selling it. We have the ability to call the vendor to get problems resolved quickly and gain access to some of the other products they sell besides SpamTitan. They seem to be responsive and keep in touch with their partners via email.

I don't know if SpamTitan has saved our clients money because it's priced similarly to the other products we were using, but it has definitely saved them time. Receiving lots of spam is a problem so the less junk email the better from an end-user standpoint. 

It reduces email clutter, improving employee productivity. It does what it says it does. It reduces spam by quite a bit above and beyond the Office 365 built-in spam filter.  One aspect our clients liked about SpamTitan was the ability to easily see what was blocked. Previously, they had to log in and search for emails. If they didn't get something they were expecting, they would see it in the report the next day. They can click a button and restore it. That's the biggest productivity benefit.

I like the notifications SpamTitan sends. Other products require the user to log into the system to see if something was blocked. SpamTitan sends users an email showing them any potential spam that was blocked and they can click on it to release it. It's much easier for the end-user.

Another feature I like is SpamTitan's integration with Active Directory. With previous spam solutions, we had to add a new user into their system and the Active Directory separately, but this is integrated.

The report comes out every morning. If a valid email gets blocked, I won't know about it until the next morning unless I log into the system to check, but it's quite a bit of work. Some users have requested that they get the report more often than once a day. If someone booked an airline flight or something that's time-sensitive and it gets blocked, they wouldn't find out until the next day. By then, it's probably too late. They would like notifications more often than once daily.

I have used SpamTitan for around six months.

I rate SpamTitan 10 out of 10 for performance and stability. I've never had any problems. It just works.

I rate SpamTitan 10 out of 10 for scalability. If I need to put thousands of users on it, I just buy the licenses, and it'll work.

I rate TitanHQ support eight out of 10. I have called them a few times. They're responsive. They're probably in the top 75th percentile in terms of support. Microsoft Office also has great support. I could them pretty quickly without waiting. They seemed to be knowledgeable and solve my problems.

Positive

We previously used Barracuda, which we had purchased from another reseller, but they weren't doing much with that anymore. We decided to do market research and see what was out there. We did some demos of SpamTitan and found it was effective. It was easy to install and competitively priced, and so that's why we switched.

Setting up SpamTitan is pretty easy. Once you flip the switch, all your email is now routed to SpamTitan, then back to Office 365. Once it's configured and you turn it on, the email just flows through the system. 

An important part of the implementation was communicating with the users, telling them what we're doing, why we're doing it, and how the reporting works. Once it's configured, we don't need to do anything else with it. There are no upgrades, maintenance, or tweaking. We'll add some whitelists occasionally, but it's very low maintenance. 

There's an annual fee, and it's reasonable. I think the pricing is decent, and the customers don't balk at the price. It is a relatively small amount per user per year, so it's a pretty easy sell.

We looked at some other solutions but not with the same depth as we reviewed SpamTitan. After some preliminary research on the other ones, we decided to do a trial. We found it met all our needs, so we continued with it.

Compared to other products, SpamTitan was easier to install and integrate with Office 365. That was a real plus, but the biggest advantage for end users is the daily report each morning that shows all the blocked emails they can release themselves. 

I rate TitanHQ SpamTitan nine out of 10. I recommend trying it. They have a trial that's pretty easy to turn on. Test it out, and I think you'll like it.

We are focused on the MRR and the MSP revenue is the main one. This shifts the relationships to long-term with our customers. Our aim is to raise the bar of the customer satisfaction and value we provide.
SpamTitan is a natural add-on for our portfolio of MSP and MSSP offerings. We love upsells, so all the customers will eventually be offered the other products from TitanHQ, but it will be step by step. Usually, it takes time to onboard a new customer. We distinguish technologies, processes and people onboarding. This is the reverse order by importance, but the right one in the timescales.
Spam protection is not a new thing on the market and most customers have some other solutions in place. When we replace another MSP, we inherit agreements that can't be cancelled today. We onboard customers with many different technologies, so we have to provide service for them and wait for the contract to expire before we can replace that technology.

We use SpamTitan to reduce to amount of time our clients' employees spend on spam emails and protect them from malicious links and attachments to improve overall IT security. These are the primary use cases. With inflation in salaries, we don't want to waste the time of our customers and employees. Also, even if we provide IT security awareness training, some people may still click or respond to something in the wrong way. The e-mail channel is still the prefered method for virus distribution.

Every employee faces an avalanche of emails daily, so one doesn't want to make the picture worse. It is preferable to remove as much as possible and still have that self-learning mechanism.

Most potential customers worldwide are aware of spam and malicious emails, so it's an easy sell. We don't have to convince them or provide a lot of use cases. It's enough to compare the competing solutions and what they can do. 
We use SpamTitan in-house, and we recommend it to our customers. We don't have to explain how it will impact user productivity. They know it's something essential. If they don't have an anti-spam solution, they must deal with a lot of spam, which is very time-consuming. A standard office user spends between 30 and 120 minutes daily sorting through emails.

It becomes more effective as time goes on. Users receive reports and provide suggestions about what to do. After a while, the system learns what is safe or malicious, becoming more precise with fewer false positives.

SpamTitan is perfectly suited for MSPs. It's easy to use and sell. It's also straightforward to configure and monitor. In my opinion, software developers at TitanHQ did an excellent job with SpamTitan. 

There are some minor technical aspects of the portals and management interface that could be improved, but there's nothing that prevents us from doing the job. 

Most of the cloud-based service providers allow us to dive deeply into all the customers from a single console. Currently, I can only see our company on the console and not any of the customers, i.e. a multitenancy approach is required for every partner portal tenant. A single pane of glass.

The geo-blocking features could have more customization options. For example, our technical operations are based in Bulgaria. Same for VMware Bulgaria, HPE Bulgaria, etc. If you geo-block India and Bulgaria, there is no way to communicate with the HP call centres.

SpamTitan will be busy with the tricky parts and not the basic ones. If you install and start using SpamTitan, where the IT maturity is low, you'll have a lot of false positives, and it will ask the user for suggestions. The customer might say, "Actually, this new product is not very good. It's asking me for everything." I would say, "Yes, it's because your organisation didn't do your job before that."

In other words, SpamTitan isn't the whole solution to the problem. SpamTitan needs someone to sort out the IT security audits and rectify the discovered issues or vulnerabilities to ensure all the prerequisites are there. After that, SpamTitan will do a proper job, but not every managed service provider or IT company understands that well. Again maturity is critical and it is applicable against MSPs, not only the customers.

I used SpamTitan in various roles for the last few years. We are a relatively new MSP in the UK, but the Bulgarian MSP has been in business for 21 years.

Email isn't real-time communication, so no one will notice if an outage isn't more than half an hour. I've never had any complaints from our users or customers. I would assume there were no outages at all. If there were any outages, they went unnoticed.

In 2018, I experienced an issue with a SpamTitan competitor, it was out for around an hour. An outage could have a potentially high impact. Just imagine if you stop the email service to your sales team. Most organizations will survive if they can't use email for an hour, but not all of them. Still, the negative impact will increase with the time of the outage.

SpamTitan is a cloud solution.  They've got a significant customer base worldwide and should have the experience of scaling out and scaling up already.

We have no concerns about scalability. Our existing customers are stable and don't expect a significant increase or decrease at the moment. There are always fluctuations, but we don't foresee significant changes. Our expectation is a gradual increase in the client base and more consumption of the SpamTitan service.

I rate TitanHQ support ten out of ten. We needed help only once, and the issue was resolved in a day.

Our team love the whole experience of partnering with TitanHQ. It's exceptionally smooth. Most of them are of the mindset that they want to respond as soon as possible. Everything is seamless. If any of us need an answer, we just shoot them an email and get what we need after a couple of hours. It's simple, and the billing is sorted out, so I don't have to think about it. Everything is automated, and I've got the correct reports. It's no hassle and a considerably valuable is presented to MSPs and end customers.

Positive

The only competing solution we used was Mimecast. The technology is fine and it works, but the pricing is prohibitive for some customers. Especially the archiving and the pearl in the crown is the data download from the archive.

Most customers use Mimecast to archive, but it's painful financially to move on from there. Other customers only use M2 due to the reasons above. They're much easier to migrate to SpamTitan. There are many other email archiving solutions, that provide a similar service.

There's no significant difference between SpamTitan and Mimecast from a technology perspective. They probably overlap 90 per cent. There are some minor differences that are insignificant. It wouldn't play a huge role in a customer's decision. However, Mimecast is significantly more expensive for the whole solution.  

SpamTitan is stable, and the support is doing its job as expected. We only opened one ticket the last year, and it was sorted during the day. It is a pragmatical decision to move to SpamTitan, considering all the factors.

Setting up SpamTitan is extremely easy. Some customers have the technical knowledge to set SpamTitan up, but in general, they preferer to use an external partner for the implementation. Everything is on the cloud. You only need to tweak a few DNS records and provide the proper training to the end-users.

The deployment is straightforward. Sometimes, we have to help the customer to sort out a mess internally before they can set up our solution. The deployment takes around an hour or two if you only need to update the DNS records. If you've got all the data from the customer and you only have to apply the changes, you need an hour or two. Afterwards, you have a period of initial support where you hold the customer's hand in case something is wrong. Generally, it's straightforward and quick. In the worst-case scenario, it takes 24 hours. The end IT user training may take longer.
One person is usually enough to handle the deployment, but we may require an additional person with experience with the customer's email servers. For instance, they might need specific knowledge of Office 365, Exchange Online, Gmail corporate edition, etc. If there is an issue with a client's email servers, we might assign another person to help if the first one is unfamiliar with the email server technology.

Business organisations aren't paying salaries for their IT users to fight spam. Even if each user only spends 15 minutes daily moving all the spam to the junk box, they can multiply that by each workday for the whole year. Any spam solution will cost just a fraction of the payroll wasted.

The time to value depends on the scale of the organization, but a client will probably see a return in the first year. SpamTitan needs to be trained to determine what is good and bad. How long? It depends on the organisation.

In other words, a single customer would need to compare the wasted employee time for the learning period. After that, they don't have any more wasted employee time or at least it is significantly reduced. SpamTitan is sorting out that issue for them for free. It's a huge gain of the work time back on their business.

The benefits start immediately after implementation. IT users can see all the daily reports of how much spam they receive. They've got the control to say, "Release that email," "Allow this email," or "Block this email." They start to teach the system. In the beginning, they're happy to do that, but eventually, they get bored. Fortunately, the system begins to do most of the work itself. After six months, the value is almost at 85 to 95 percent.

After a year, it is close to 100 percent of its value. If you want to use an anti-spam solution, you should expect a minimum of three years before you get a proper return on your investment. The first year is spent making the system aware of what's happening. You've got the real value in the second and the third year. It makes perfect sense when you spread the value across all the years.

The price of SpamTitan is reasonable and it makes sense. The end customer pays for the license and the professional services to us to set up the whole solution. Usually, it's part of a much bigger project.

I rate SpamTitan a ten out of ten. It's an easy sell. The price is insignificant compared to the money the customer saves. They also have an insurance policy with high protection against reputational risk. It mitigates so many other risks for the organization. A modern organization needs to have spam protection and the overall maturity of the UK market helps to shift the conversation from "Do we need such a solution?" to "What solution is best for us?"

SpamTitan MSP model has adapted well for MSPs to resell the subscription and get the money from the customer to pay it back to TitanHQ. The support is good and quick. SpamTitan does the job and ticks all the boxes from an end-customer point of view and a managed service provider perspective. They deliver real value to both parties.

We use it for spam filtering and anti-phishing on our email products.

When I started with my current company two years ago, it didn't have any type of spam filter. It was getting flooded and there were breached email accounts on a regular basis. Since I put in SpamTitan, I've had three breached accounts in Outlook, over the past two years, among our 160 employees. I've seen a drastic improvement in security.

It definitely saves employees' time because they don't have to sort through junk and spam emails. On any given day we have between 400 and 500 emails blocked by SpamTitan. My current weekly report shows that six viruses were blocked within that time span. It has really impacted me because every time an employee would get a spam email, they would post it to our team's forum and tag me. I'd have to look at it and it would waste my time. Now, our employees don't get spam emails.

I'm a real big fan of the new Link Lock feature.

I also use the solution's geo-blocking. The only downside about that is that our owners are from the UK, so I have to be careful about that. But the geo-blocking has resulted in about a 5 percent decrease in spam emails and that's big, given how many emails we have coming in. And geo-blocking is very easy and very intuitive to use. If I want to block country X, but allow these other countries, it is very easily managed.

Another nice feature is how tailored it is so that I can adjust the domain reputation score. At certain times of the year we run marketing campaigns and I can raise the score a little bit and that way we get feedback more readily. And during Christmas time, when the bad guys try to pull people in, I can turn it down and make it a little bit tighter. People will then let me know, "Hey, I need this email, I'm blocked," and I can do that within five to 10 minutes,

It would be nice if the reporting feature could be updated. 

Also, the feel of the web interface is a little dated. It has been the same ever since the days when I first started learning it. It's nice because it's familiar, but I could see how it might turn people off because it's not necessarily flashy.

I have been using TitanHQ SpamTitan off and on for the past five or six years and consistently for the last two years in my current company.

The stability is perfect. I've never had a problem in two years. It's one of the things that I have to worry least about maintaining. Being in a 300,000-square-foot warehouse with IDFs and not having to stress about that is very nice.

To scale it, I don't have to do anything. If we go over a certain number of emails per day, from back and forth, from a certain email address, it gets counted as a license. As long as I stay under our license number, I'm fine. But it can scale as much as I want. The scalability is fantastic.

It's deployed against eight domains within a range of in-house and warehouse staff. A lot of people are on mobile devices and we don't see any slowdown with it, and that's fantastic. 

We have multiple locations within Texas, and the nice part of it being on the cloud is that it's not something that we have to apply to each individual site. We can just apply it to the cloud in front of our 365 and all of our offices are covered. We don't have to build special roles and profiles for each location. It's just one for the company.

They're close to perfect. When the new Link Lock feature came out, they called me and said, "Hey, Robert, we know that you are interested in this. Let's show you what it is." We set it up and bought it and now it's deployed. 

They're proactive but not overbearing.

I have used a competitor of SpamTitan, and their support ranks at a nine out of 10 against that other company because, with that company, it was days before I would hear something from them. With SpamTitan, it's usually the same day.

Positive

We did not have a previous solution, but SpamTitan was my go-to. It was a requirement when I took the job.

It's a cloud solution and I enjoyed going through the rollout and deployment because the vendor was very helpful with that. They were there for any questions that I had, because things had changed since I had last implemented it. And we have multiple domains under our umbrella, and the ease of SpamTitan as a multiple-domain solution was really nice.

I would rate the deployment process an eight and a half out of 10. There were some things that probably could have been tuned up, and maybe explained a little bit better, but they were there to help me if I had any questions.

The implementation was pretty methodical. They would say, "Okay, Robert, this is what we need to do. This is how we need to set it up. We need to change these things." I would do those things that night, come in the next morning, and we would make sure the mail flow was working. They were very step-by-step-oriented, and that was nice.

The ease of configuration, after deployment, was moderate. You spend a week or two learning it and testing things out and you get pretty proficient with it pretty quickly.

And maintenance of it is 100 percent lightweight. I rarely touch anything.

We used TitanHQ's engineers directly. My experience with them was fantastic. They made it easier than I thought it would be with the time difference, because they're in Ireland. But they made it work. They're very professional.

On our side, it was just me involved.

We have seen ROI, not only in time but in security. On top of that, with the Link Lock feature, it really does prove itself.

The pricing is very reasonable and very comparable in the industry. It's not the cheapest, but it's not the most expensive.

Their licensing structure does leave a little bit to be desired. I would like it to be easier to understand how I can add licenses and update things.

I did a lot of evaluation, comparing cost and functionality for my partners on the board, but in the back of my mind, SpamTitan was the only one I wanted to use.

I have read a lot of tech releases and about certain products over the past 15 years. I keep an eye on certain things but SpamTitan has been voted one of the best spam blockers over the past many years. It's also very easy to use. I'm a one-man shop in a company with 160 people. That's a lot for one person, especially the director of IT, to be responsible for. 

It's simple enough to log in to the solution, that I can walk one of my owners, or the CEO or CFO, through that process if I'm out of the office. That is a big advantage. It's not overly complicated, although it could be refined a little bit more.

My advice would be to watch your domain reputation score. That can be a little bit odd and a little bit finicky at times. Other than that, pull the trigger and go for it. It is easy and safe.

I give the solution a 10 out of 10. I've never had a problem with it to this day. When my owners come to me and say, "Hey, can we cut costs?" I'll say, "We can." If they say, "What about SpamTitan?" my answer is "Nope." Then I show them the reports and they'll say, "Yep, we're not getting rid of it." It sells itself. It's very easy to prove its worth and that is very beneficial for me.

We use SpamTitan as our email filtering solution.

We are in a college setting.

We have had excellent results with this product. Within a week of implementing SpamTitan, it blocked a ransomware event. This made our jobs a lot easier. Within the past six months, we've had 1.3 million emails come in, and out of those, 900,000 were clean. It's blocked 40 viruses.

It's blocked 115,000 emails from either invalid recipients or from different types of filters that it has, such as Real-Time Black List Filtering (RBL), or HELO reject.

In the beginning, we had issues with false positives while the system was using its AI to learn. We've only had one major incident, and that was due to the way our college wrote the email. It was worded so that students would reply, and SpamTitan thought that this was spam being sent. I had to fix that in the system. This problem wasn't SpamTitan's fault; rather, it was the way that we had set it up that caused it to act that way.

Overall, it has improved our security posture.

The most valuable feature is the reporting on bounced emails. If an email has been blocked or bounced, or a client tells me that they're not receiving a certain email, I can go into the reports and rather quickly look to see if it's shown up at all. If it has, I can either release it to the client or tell them what happened with it. Overall, the reporting is excellent.

The interface is very user-friendly and you can access it from anywhere in the world. It is easy to use, very well thought out and doesn't have a steep learning curve.

This product is excellent in terms of its overall intuitiveness.

The only downside is that there is a delay when we're waiting for a report to be generated. It normally takes between 30 seconds and a minute when you're dealing with more than a million emails.

I have been working with TitanHQ SpamTitan for approximately six months.

This is a very reliable tool. I look up logs every day, especially when clients say that they can't find an email. The system has not been down in the time that we've had it running.

The scalability is awesome. If we need more licenses then we call them and they take care of it.

The communication with them is perfect. In fact, we had a call with them earlier today that they initiated, which is awesome for customer service. We were doing biweekly checkups and now, we're moving to quarterly checkups.

The customer service is excellent. If there is a problem then a lot of the time, they know before we do. Compared to the technical support that I have experienced with other vendors, TitanHQ is top-notch.

I would rate the technical support a ten out of ten. They don't hesitate to help, which is unheard of in the IT industry.

Positive

This is the first spam solution that we used. The college knew that other colleges were being hacked, so I was brought in as a security person.

I started with the help desk and when I moved up to the security role, I saw that we didn't have a spam filtering solution in place. This is when we looked into implementing one.

We had the system set up and configured within 30 minutes. Being able to set it up quickly was important to us because we needed something as soon as possible. We wanted something that we could implement without too much setup on our side.

The vendor assisted us with the setup. We use Gmail, and they helped us with our Gmail configuration including setting up the folders. After that, the filter was working.

Just for myself and my team, using SpamTitan saves at least two hours per week.

We pay for licenses and the price structure is very clean. You don't have to pay for on-premises equipment and perhaps a monthly service fee for hardware.

When I began my search, I went to some security forums and looked at some online publications that I read frequently. I started with a list of perhaps 15 solutions, which got narrowed down to five and then got narrowed down to one.

One of the other products was Barracuda, and it was the price that set it apart.

Also, I like that with SpamTitan, there is no on-premises device that I have to maintain. I only have to pay for the license and don't have to pay for equipment with a monthly fee.

SpamTitan provides a feature that can be used for geo-blocking, although we don't use it because we're a college and we have international students.

My advice for anybody who is considering this solution is to definitely try it. Give them a chance because they gave us a free month to test it. When we first started looking, they acted like we were already one of their customers. They didn't just give us a link and tell us to figure it out. Rather, we set up a phone meeting, got everything set up, and we were running on their system for a month before we decided to adopt it. They gave us plenty of time to test their product before we purchased it. That was a big deciding factor in our decision to implement it.

In summary, this is an awesome system. They have other products and we're currently looking at them.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We primarily use the solution to filter out all the spam messages and go through and review other messages that get tagged as spam and figure out what's real and what's not.

It's cut down on our amount of spam. It has cut down on the number of ransomware attacks which are all generated from email. It's definitely helped out that way. Occasionally I do get one where I need to ask "Hey, is this real?" However, I can go in there and look through the filter and see that one got through, with another 30 being blocked. In the learning pattern that it offers, it can realize tricky emails may have been spam and will tag everybody else's as spam as well. That way, only one, maybe two users might get it. It is really good at seeing and learning. 

The spam blocking has been good. I like the fact that I can go back in and review old messages that had been tagged as spam before my users can get to them and either delete them so they can't approve them or allow them through.

We use SpamTitan's geo-blocking feature. I have many rules set up. Obviously, in the spam world, the spammers find ways around not being tagged as spam. We tend to get the same type of messages over and over again. Therefore, I have phrases set up to block messages. We're blocking mail by region as well. The geo-blocking feature for restricting emails from specific destinations based on IP or country is fantastic. It works great. All of our business here is done throughout the U.S. and therefore we block most of the stuff from other countries. If I start to see a bad habit form I can block that country or region.

It's not always just spam. A lot of times it can be phishing attempts. There may be people trying to email, saying "Here's your invoice for this product," and it was obvious it's not a product that they had ever ordered. In this day and age with phishing and ransomware, things come through via an unassuming email. We need to protect ourselves against ransomware and this works great. I don't care about junk messages that come through about buy this, buy that, and all this stuff. It's more of the ransomware that I get concerned with and we're trying to block it.

The geo-blocking feature allows us to block spam emails entering our network and servers, reducing our spam intake. In terms of spam reduction, it does equally as well as some of the other items that we've used. However, I really like the features. I would say it easily catches 95% or more of spam. Occasionally, you do get something that slips through, and it's always going to happen.

The user interface experience of SpamTitan is "easy peasy." I like the user interface. It's fairly self-explanatory, fairly easy to figure out, and if I ever have a question, I can call them up or open a support ticket and get an answer really fast. Their support team is fantastic.

It has helped to improve our false positive rate. We don't have very many false positives. The only time I have false positives is from rules that I created. I get people that will sometimes use a phrase or something that will get caught up in the filter. False positives are my own fault, from me tightening security down even further than it should, as I have certain phrases that I use in there, and if somebody puts one of those phrases in, word for word, then they're going to get blocked, and that's happened a couple of times. However, it allows me to go through to check. The users will say, "Hey, I was waiting for an email from this person. They say they sent it and I haven't got it," and then I see them, I see that message in there, and I release it.

It probably saves employees some time. I've never asked them directly, however, I know it has to save them time as they don't have to go through all those messages and figure out what's good and what's bad.

Sometimes when I'm trying to pull up reports, the speed can suffer. If I'm looking at the last seven days, if I pull up just today, when it's retrieving the message history, if I pull up with the last hour or the last, or that day, it's fine. However, if I have to go back several days, it could take a little longer than I'd like it. That said, I'm usually not in a rush. Still, sometimes it does get stuck there for maybe a minute or two. It makes me question the network, however, when I check the network speed, it seems fine. It's not a major, major concern. However, if I had anything, I would ask that they try to find a way to retrieve those older messages faster.

We switched over to SpamTitan in 2020, although we did have it before and we had to archive it. We started using it right around April or May of 2020. It's been about two years now that we've been using SpamTitan.

The stability of the solution has been great. It's been a stable platform. The only one thing I could ask for is when you're going through to older histories it's just a little slow when you're trying to pull up messages older than a day or two. You try to pull up messages that are three, four, or five days old to go look for an old message, and it just seems like it wants to take a little longer than it should. We're also on a cloud solution. I don't know how many other users are on this cloud. Maybe it has to do with too many users on the cloud trying to do searches or incoming mails at the same time. I'm sure they'll figure it out. 

It's pretty scalable. It works. We have it for our particular organization and it just fits perfectly. We make it work for us. We have certain email addresses that we always allow through and sometimes it does catch a false positive. Our false positives are a lot less, and that's due to the rules I created. It's just whitelisting those and blacklisting the other ones that we don't want. It works great.

I have 30 users, however, some people have double email addresses as they have an alias address. We're dealing with about 40 email addresses. 

Their support is A+. If I can give them an 11 or a 12 out of ten, I would. They've always been there for me when I've had questions. They've answered anything I've asked within a very reasonable amount of time, and if I've ever needed any help they've always been there to jump on in and explain why.

Positive

I switched when I took back over for this company. We had an in-house solution, a Barracuda box, which was in-house, and when it was time to upgrade the hardware, Barracuda was just too expensive. It worked really well when we first got it. We enjoyed it when we first got it. However, also with Barracuda, I had to be onsite or VPN'd in so that I could look at messages, whereas with SpamTitan I can be out there doing wherever. 

I first demoed SpamTitan five years ago when I was working for a different company, and we went through their demo process of it, and then when we went through to do the purchase of it, the credit card transaction failed as it was out of country. It was based out of Ireland. The owners didn't want to do business where money was going overseas. In the end, they made me find a local company.

We went with a different company that was local to the U.S. then and used them for that company. However, when I came back to this company where I'm at now, and we decided, "Okay, well it's time to get rid of this Barracuda box," I went straight to SpamTitan as I had already had experience with them and with SpamHero, which was web-based. It was nice, however, I remember that I had liked SpamTitan so much better and I was a little frustrated at the ownership of the other company that they didn't want to go with the SpamTitan.

To me, the interface and the ease of use were a lot better, whereas the other one, when I hired a new user, it would quarantine all their mail until I went in there and there was an extra step that I had to take on another product that we had. 

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. The instructions that they include with it are easy. It was very easy to set up through Office365 in my DNS. The instructions were straight and clear, right to the point. I probably could have given this to my kid and he could have figured it out.

The ease of setup and ease of use is always important. However, I don't remember how long it took me to set up. I would say when we had it in-house and our mail was coming in-house, it was set up fairly easy. I want to say it took no longer than 20 minutes just to get it set up and working.

I had to call TitanHQ at the outset. I had questions about the way the phrases worked. It wasn't really with the setup of it, however. While I didn't need them for the setup, when I was looking to block phrases, I wanted to make sure I wasn't looping myself and causing myself more of a headache. I did have questions on blocking certain messages, as we also had one email address that nobody else has that we didn't want messages to be filtered from. I did have to call them to ask them, "Hey, how can I make messages to this one user not get filtered so they get everything?" We got them on the phone and we had it fixed in less than five minutes.

We've definitely seen an ROI in terms of just the amount of spam that's cut back and hack attempts that we've been able to block and filter out. For those reasons alone, it's definitely worth it.

It is probably one of the more reasonably priced options out there. SpamHero was right in line with the same pricing. However, their interface and their usability are not as easy as SpamTitan. 

You get fantastic service with this product. In contrast, if I wanted to call Barracuda with an issue, they never returned calls. It's all web-based, so you can't get anybody on the phone if you need stuff with Barracuda, and when you do it's like pulling teeth. 

With SpamTitan, based on their price and actually being able to get somebody on the phone, it just made it worth every penny.

I did not look at other options. As soon as I came back to this company and realized that we needed to switch from Barracuda when it was time to upgrade the hardware, I knew we were more budget conscience. Barracuda is nice, however, it breaks the budget, and it was also a physical device that was in the building. I couldn't remotely manage it. I remembered SpamTitan and the demo I did before and decided to definitely go with them.

With SpamTitan we have our mail, mail that used to be in-house, until July 2021. Now we're using Office365 for our main mail, however, our SpamTitan has always been hosted on its own cloud. We're on the SpamTitan cloud.

I'd advise any new users to just sign up. Just don't even bother considering it, just sign up and go with it. You won't regret it. Its ease of use, ease of setup, and ease of admin all make it worthwhile. Everything is just so easy.

I'd rate the solution a ten out of ten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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