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Mikael Jordan - PeerSpot reviewer
Help Desk Manager/Information Security Analyst at Eureka College
Real User
Good reporting, user-friendly interface, and it's well-priced
Pros and Cons
  • "Within a week of implementing SpamTitan, it blocked a ransomware event."
  • "The only downside is that there is a delay when we're waiting for a report to be generated."

What is our primary use case?

We use SpamTitan as our email filtering solution.

We are in a college setting.

How has it helped my organization?

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.

What is most valuable?

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.

What needs improvement?

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.

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.
814,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.

For how long have I used the solution?

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

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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

How are customer service and support?

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.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

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

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.

How was the initial setup?

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.

What about the implementation team?

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.

What was our ROI?

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

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

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.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

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.

What other advice do I have?

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.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
IT Director at Pitre Auto Group
Real User
Does a great job of validating and inspecting emails and making a decision on scoring mechanisms
Pros and Cons
  • "I've been pretty pleased with technical support. They're pretty responsive. They answer quickly. They come up with solutions really quickly as well."
  • "I'm not 100% sure how well they scan certain attachments."

What is our primary use case?

It's a spam filter, so all of the emails come through SpamTitan before it comes to us.

I can log into it and direct all my MX records and it intercepts and reads all the emails. We can then determine if something's invalid. It holds it instead of sending it off. We get a quarantine report if they've had something intercepted.

It's used just for inbound and outbound email communications. It's used for email features.

How has it helped my organization?

It helps protect the individual users to avoid trouble and increase productivity. They don't get their mailboxes clogged up with a bunch of garbage.

What is most valuable?

Its spam protection is excellent.

The user interface experience of SpamTitan is great. It's pretty intuitive. They do an update once and I don't have to call and ask again as it makes sense where you click and it hasn't changed. That's one thing that's nice. Every update is all the same in terms of the UI. They don't move things around. 

In terms of overall intuitiveness, I'm highly impressed. Some of what I use daily, if I log in and try to look up a report, add an email, block somebody or search histories, how to get there, find it, and set the filters seems very intuitive. I don't get into it very often - maybe once or twice a month if something comes up. However, I'm always able to easily now give my way around without having to go look up old notes or call support again and ask another question.

SpamTitan has helped improve the false positive rate although I'm not sure by how much. It does a great job of validating and inspecting emails and making a decision on scoring mechanisms. There are also other options where I could go in and add other levels of features that I want to score against. I don't find very many emails being captured that shouldn't be. 

I've worked with different spam filters and I actually like SpamTitan the best. It's great and it's also a lower-cost option. It seems to work better than any other option I've ever used. Participating with end-users and the quarantine email seems a lot more simple for them to understand and to just click and release, allowing options. It's very easy for me to go into, make changes, and navigate. 

SpamTitan has helped save employees time by not having to sort through junk and spam emails. I don't get many calls where people are trying to find an email and are having a hard time. Once a month somebody says, "Hey, I can't find this email." Or they ask a question. However, in general, it saves a lot of my time.

Getting users to clean up their mailbox really has nothing to do with a spam filter. That's another story. However, this definitely helps reduce the number of garbage emails they receive. The other solutions have got more passing through than this one would, or probably a lot more false positives where the legitimate email they're looking for was being intercepted. This product definitely is more productive.

In terms of time savings, it's been easier for me as the person responsible. I don't have to deal with phone calls when there's a problem. I had more issues to deal with using the prior solution than I do with this one.

What needs improvement?

I'm not 100% sure how well they scan certain attachments. I know spam filtering is a huge game in a constant battle, however, sometimes you'll get some just obviously bogus emails coming through with an attached file that they're just praying for you to open. I don't know if there's something they can do to help catch some of those. Other than that, just keeping up with day-to-day changes, it's a constant battle with spam, so there's never a perfect solution. That's never perfect 100% of the time.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using the solution for over two years. It's been almost three.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I'm pretty impressed with the stability so far. This will be the end of three years coming up and I know they're in a different country, however, they're still there and still working. We haven't had any issues.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It's already over licensed beyond what I even use, just based on the way it was sold. I don't perceive myself as outgrowing it. If I needed to, I could just increase the license by paying more money.

It's scalable. I have to use the full capacity of what our email transactions are and since it goes through them first before it hits us, we don't have to waste the bandwidth on all those bad emails.

How are customer service and support?

I've been pretty pleased with technical support. They're pretty responsive. They answer quickly. They come up with solutions really quickly as well. They don't feel like they try to blow you off with excuses. They seem pretty knowledgeable about the product.

With my key provider in the past, going through their channels was slow. With these guys, I can call up and within two minutes, somebody's on the phone and they're in the system and we find the answer. We're usually done in 20 minutes or less.

While, for me, support is not of high importance as the solution just does what it does and moves along. That said, it sure is nice when I do need to reach out that I have that quick response. If their support wasn't as good, would I still use the product? Yes.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

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

I've used spam filtering before. I found these people and did some examples and sessions with them and just decided I like their product and I just quoted it and said, got an authorization.

I didn't really care that the other product had an integration with an MSP client and we were separating from them. It made it difficult to sometimes access the email. We had to contact them for support. The transition to this was a matter of just getting it plugged in, typing in some of my domain, my information, updating my records and I just started shooting at it. 

How was the initial setup?

It was incredibly easy to set up, configure and then start using SpamTitan. I pretty much can't live without spam filtering nowadays. 

The deployment took maybe three hours.

I first set it up with all the information and verified that it was good to go. Once I was done, I swapped my records in the public world and I stopped using an old service and I started flowing right through them. If I had any issues or concerns, I could change those records back. I had the new service and the old service running together for a little while until I finally decided it was time to get rid of the old stuff.

What about the implementation team?

I worked with their support in the transition. It really went flawlessly, as far as the end-users, they had no clue, there was no downtime. Mostly I handled the implementation myself and if there were any questions I had, I worked with their technical support.

What was our ROI?

I'm not sure if looking at the solution from an ROI perspective is applicable for this product.

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

There haven't been any other costs in addition to the standard licensing fee. They did recently reach out as they're offering another service that's an add-on license that'll do some URL scanning. We talked about it. We just haven't pulled the trigger yet. Other than that, there's never been any additional costs and even their yearly renewals haven't changed by increasing at all.

I don't really have any specifics like you should do this or do that. I just purchased a yearly license at a time. It's not a monthly thing. I just pay upfront for the whole year.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

I did look at a few solutions that I had touched myself in different places. I did some Google searches, however, their cost of licensing compared to everyone else is an amazingly different charge. I thought I'd give them a shot. This will be my third year of renewals at the end of this year and I have no intentions of not renewing with them.

What other advice do I have?

I'd advise those considering the solution to go for it. I felt a little iffy at first that they're not based in my area. I took a chance on them and I'm extremely happy.

I'd rate the solution a nine out of ten. If they were actually able to catch the people sending the spam, I'd give them a perfect ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
TitanHQ SpamTitan
October 2024
Learn what your peers think about TitanHQ SpamTitan. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: October 2024.
814,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Abdul Ali - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Analyst at Eviva
Real User
We have regained productivity hours since automating our email protection
Pros and Cons
  • "We have absolutely seen ROI. The regained productivity hours that we were able to claim since we automated the email protection have been really good. Our team of three people has seen an increase in our productivity, by around 30%, since implementing SpamTitan."
  • "The documentation for how to configure it could be better. Sometimes, it was confusing. When we were onboarding with them, the documentation was a little bit vague on how to configure the DNS server and our email server."

What is our primary use case?

We are using the spam filtering and the graylisting features for emails on Microsoft Office 365. In general, we are using their geo-blocking feature and email protection for malware, spam, phishing emails, etc.

How has it helped my organization?

We are pretty happy with it. The solution is pretty good. We have been able to block a lot of unwanted emails and attacks with it.

The most valuable benefit is the regained productivity for the IT team who used to do all the filtering manually before we had SpamTitan. We were able to leverage its spam blocking and email protection, getting back a lot of productivity hours for our IT team to focus on other aspects of the business.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable feature would be the customizable policies that we use for routing emails. Since spam is evolving every day and finding new ways to attack, we have to do some tweaks in email policies, how to deal with the DeMark configurations. 

I like the zero-day attacks blocking feature. We were able to block a ton of spam emails and phishing emails coming from the outside. 

Sometimes, when there is an email thread, one of the emails doesn't have the same score of protection as the other emails, then the system might trigger that this is spam and graylist it. However, it looks at the overall thread and doesn't block the email. We were using a spam filtering software before that was very aggressive and that was blocking a lot of clean emails.

The geo-blocking feature really works. We can identify certain IPs based on geolocation, e.g., known IPs as well as identify a lot of databases based origination. It has been really helpful in blocking these kinds of emails. The geo-blocking feature has reduced our spam intake by 95%. Every once in a while, we get emails that bypass the geolocation, then we end up getting the spam. 

What needs improvement?

The documentation for how to configure it could be better. Sometimes, it was confusing. When we were onboarding with them, the documentation was a little bit vague on how to configure the DNS server and our email server. It took a little bit of time, but we were able to actually reach out to their support. 

For the UI, I would like to see clearer verbiage of the links. When you go to the UI, the wording can be improved, e.g., how the description of features is displayed. Other than that, it is pretty self-explanatory.

For how long have I used the solution?

We have been using it for about six months.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

We haven't had any issues with stability or uptime. It has been pretty good.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

For now, it has been handling really well the volumes of emails that we are getting. So, it is scalable for any small- to medium-sized business.

We are monitoring around 20 mailboxes.

There are no plans right now to expand with the service that they are providing us. Right now, it meets our needs.

How are customer service and support?

We only used their support once, so I cannot really judge the support capabilities of SpamTitan. We didn't really need it, except in the beginning when we were configuring the service.

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

There was a gap of about a year between Proofpoint and SpamTitan. For about a year, we were only using the GoDaddy Advance Email Security plan, but it wasn't really good. So, I was shopping around and actually considering Proofpoint again, since I have experience with them and was pretty happy with their service. I also looked at a lot of other service providers, like Barracuda. Then, I looked at the reviews for SpamTitan. The pricing was much more competitive than other solutions, so I was like, "Okay, let's give it a try." 

How was the initial setup?

The setup and configuration were okay. From my experience with Proofpoint, SpamTitan took a bit more time to configure, about a week. Overall, the solution is fine; it is not bad. Anybody with a background in email servers would be able to configure it easily with no issues.

We didn't really need to do anything in terms of planning. We didn't need to do any data migrations or integrations with other solutions.

It was straightforward. Once the configuration was done, and we switched it to SpamTitan, that downtime was about half an hour. In terms of planning ahead, we just needed to tell everybody in the organization that you may experience a bit of disconnect in emails. That didn't last for long. We didn't have to have a contingency plan or anything like that.

In the beginning, we had false positives because we have a lot of emails originating from overseas. The system usually gray lists these emails and false positives, but we have been able to train the system. Every time that we get a false positive, we tell it that it is not a spam email. So, in the first few months, I had to go to SpamTitan's portal and unblock a lot of emails. That would be at a rate of maybe three or five emails out of 500 emails a day, which is not terrible. Right now, we are doing that maybe twice a month.

What was our ROI?

We have absolutely seen ROI. The regained productivity hours that we were able to claim since we automated the email protection have been really good. Our team of three people has seen an increase in our productivity, by around 30%, since implementing SpamTitan.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

User interface is not terrible. It is not as user-friendly as other solutions, but it is okay. At one time, we used Proofpoint, which was actually very easy to configure and user-friendly. You don't have to have an IT background for its configuration. SpamTitan is a little user-friendly, but it is very functional. 

What other advice do I have?

Specifically for the geolocation, we have another layer of protection coming directly from Microsoft Exchange Server. So, we have been able to catch whatever has been missed by SpamTitan in the Exchange Server. While the ability to restrict emails from specific destinations in SpamTitan is really good, I wouldn't say that we rely on the feature 100%, which blocks about 85% to 90%.

We have been happy with it. SpamTitan is one of the best solutions out there. It is on par with other solution providers for the same services. For anybody looking for good email protection and basic features, like malware scanning, zero-day attacks, graylisting, and customizable policies, SpamTitan is a pretty good fit. It also has good pricing.

Overall, I would rate SpamTitan as nine out of 10.

Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
George Kajaia - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of IT Infrastructure Group, IT Operations Department at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Work hours are not lost searching through spam emails to determine which emails are legitimate
Pros and Cons
  • "We have a lot less spam going through. Because of this, work hours are not lost searching through all the spam emails to determine which ones are legitimate. This saves our bank clients' time since they are not forced to search their inbox for legitimate emails between spams. Not a lot of spam is going through. I think time is essential and we are gaining a lot of it with this solution since a lot of emails are automatically filtered out."
  • "I would like to implement a secondary delivery pool for mass mailings, having an alternate pool for mass mailing lists since there is only a single mail queue with SpamTitan. For example, if 10,000 emails are being sent, then the queue will be large. Unfortunately, without a secondary delivery pool, legitimate emails will wait in the queue to be delivered to my email. Therefore, I would like to have two queues: one for everyday emails and another for mass mailings. Now, I have to decide whether to buy a second SpamTitan license just for this reason because I am very satisfied with the functionality of SpamTitan overall and don't want to use another sender's appliance for this."

What is our primary use case?

Our entire bank is using SpamTitan in a virtualized environment at several locations. It migrates from one server room to a different one. For example, if a server room goes down, it just migrates to the second one, then it goes up there. We have a single SpamTitan virtual appliance, which is on both sides of our data center. When a data center is down or very load heavy, it just migrates to the second one and we work through there.

How has it helped my organization?

We have a lot less spam going through. Because of this, work hours are not lost searching through all the spam emails to determine which ones are legitimate. This saves our bank clients' time since they are not forced to search their inbox for legitimate emails between spams. Not a lot of spam is going through. I think time is essential and we are gaining a lot of it with this solution since a lot of emails are automatically filtered out. 

We have gained back 50% of our time. Our management had some contacts with huge amounts of spam coming. For example, every morning at 10:00 AM, one of our managers already had more than 100 emails. Of those 100 emails, more than 80 emails were spam. He had an easy email to guess, making it easy for spammers to add him to their spam portals.

What is most valuable?

It is easy to work with.

SpamTitan is visible right away. You go to the portal, log into your page, and everything is visible there, e.g., your whitelist, blacklist, etc. So, it is very good.

SpamTitan has a cool vehicle called IP delivery pools. We have 20 domains with various products and are using this feature to send mass emails.

What needs improvement?

In history on the reporting graph, when you are trying to search for sender by address, it won't search by domain. I could send an email from SendGrid with my domain, but with SpamTitan, if you search by that domain then it wouldn't search it. It only searches from the field, not in the envelope field. Unfortunately, mass mailing companies, like SendGrid, send email with the form address and that completely differs from the domain envelope form address. There is no way to search for the envelope form. So, I gave them an idea to improve this filtering. For example, if I have to search an email sent by SendGrid, then I am forced to search by the recipient, then find the emails marked as spam. This is quite a huge hassle. They told me that they are aware of this and will try to add it, but they haven't added it yet.

I would like to implement a secondary delivery pool for mass mailings, having an alternate pool for mass mailing lists since there is only a single mail queue with SpamTitan. For example, if 10,000 emails are being sent, then the queue will be large. Unfortunately, without a secondary delivery pool, legitimate emails will wait in the queue to be delivered to my email. Therefore, I would like to have two queues: one for everyday emails and another for mass mailings. Now, I have to decide whether to buy a second SpamTitan license just for this reason because I am very satisfied with the functionality of SpamTitan overall and don't want to use another sender's appliance for this.

From 2020 to 2021, there was a huge switch in the types of spam coming in. SpamTitan's anti-spam should be enabled to catch this spam. The spam catching rate went down over the last three to four years. I think this is because spammers are evolving and using different methods to send spam emails.

The phishing rate of SpamTitan is not great, even Exchange Online Protection catches phishing better than SpamTitan. The most worrying are the phishing emails. I would like SpamTitan to upgrade and improve the phishing catch rate.

The sandbox of the Bitdefender engine is not working correctly. They sent me an email that they pulled it because it was not working as it was intended to work. So, they are working on this as well, and maybe the sandbox will be fixed. The sandbox is for viruses. If something goes through then it is sent to the sandbox for analysis. However, I am not using the sandbox right now. I am just quarantining this type of attachment right away.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using it for about seven and a half years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

SpamTitan has had several bugs, even now they have one or two bugs. However, they can think of a workaround, then apply it for us. They are very helpful in this regard.

There isn't so much maintenance. For example, when a new version arrives, we just take a snapshot and upgrade it. One time, we had a problem after they upgraded something. It was not working correctly, so we opened a case and they helped us. I think this was when we migrated from version 6 to version 7, but it was fixed fine just in a matter of hours.

Another issue was where SendGrid had a very high spam rate with SpamTitan, so I opened a case. They told us that this was a bug with the engine and it would be fixed in the next version of SpamTitan.

We have had several small quirks with these types of engines, and it has just been the matter of fine tuning them.

On one version, we had an issue when the Bitdefender antivirus engine was stopping. That was about three years ago or so. This issue was fixed after upgrading the appliance. It was some kind of bug, and they fixed it in the next version. With this issue, I received an email that the engine had stopped. Then, I went through the appliance and it started the engine. It would work for a week or so, then it would hang again. I cannot remember any more bugs.

This solution needs to be 100% stable and rock-solid because our organization is a bank and quite dependent on email communication. That is why we have stayed with SpamTitan for seven year since it is a rock-solid solution.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We have approximately 8,000 endpoints, but only 5,000 or so are using outside bank communication of some sort. We have a 5,000 user license, which is more than enough for us at the moment. We are not hitting the 5,000 mark. If we hit it, then we would buy additional licenses.

How are customer service and support?

It is a small company. I have quite a lot of experience contacting different kinds of support, e.g., Microsoft, Forcepoint, etc. SpamTitan has one of the best supports.

They are very responsive, friendly, and knowledgeable people. I never had an issue where I raise a ticket for a problem and they got rid of me, like Microsoft does all the time. That is why I think that 70% of the product's value is its support.

With one of our other products, there is a problem. We opened a case about five months ago and they don't have an estimated time for fixing the issue. Whereas, with SpamTitan, if they don't have an estimated time for fixing an issue, they have some kind of workaround in place. They connect to us and implement the workaround, then test it with us. Then, if we are happy, they will leave it alone. I don't have to talk with anyone else. 

SpamTitan support has never had me hanging with an unresolved test in seven years. I would rate them as 10 out of 10 compared to other solutions, like Forcepoint and Barracuda. For example, Microsoft support didn't have the necessary product knowledge. The Level 1 support of Microsoft had zero knowledge and their Level 2 support knowledge is zero and a half (out of 10). Only level three of Microsoft support, which is very difficult to get to, is quite knowledgeable. 

SpamTitan is a very small company. They don't have Level 1 and Level 2 support. Their support is just as knowledgeable as they can be. There are no layers where you are passed to someone who knows more. Right away, when you are contacting support, they know their product just fine and are aware of things.

Right now, we have one open case regarding IP delivery proof. We have a small problem with it. I think it is a bug, but I am certain they will fix it. 

There is not a product out there that works 100%. I am a very old IT administrator. I know that every product has its bugs, but there are only several companies with whom I have contact that say they can and would fix their bugs in a quick manner. SpamTitan is one of them. For example, we had a huge problem with the new antivirus engine built within SpamTitan. Even though they pulled back the old engine for us, they reconfigured our on-prem SpamTitan to be able to fix this so-called bug. So, they are very good at helping us fix issues.

I would rate SpamTitan's technical support as 10 out of 10. First and foremost, if there is a bug or problem, they are doing their best to fix it, which is a good thing.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

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

We had Forcepoint anti-spam in place about eight years ago, then it expired and Microsoft didn't continue to support the product. So, I was forced to search for a good, well-rounded anti-spam solution that would be cheap and had good support.

I chose SpamTitan because it was cheap and the rating was quite good. I just wanted to test the solution and determine if it would be okay for us, then we would get it. If not, then we could find something else more costly. When I tested it, we had some little challenges and their support was great. 

The spam catch rate went through the roof when Forcepoint just ceased to exist because Microsoft killed off the product. The spam catch rate began to rise because no engines were updating. After we implemented SpamTitan, we right away saw that the spam catch rate was very good, even before fine tuning. However, we had several false positives when legitimate mail was caught. Even today, legitimate mail is sometimes caught as spam, and it should not be. This is so much less now because we have been fine tuning SpamTitan for seven years. The spam catch rate is quite high at approximately 96%.

Forcepoint's stability was good. It was not hanging or doing anything wrong. It was a very good product. I cannot comprehend why Microsoft killed off this solution, because it was very good. Forcepoint anti-spam was a very good solution. It worked just fine, but Microsoft somehow managed to kill it.

How was the initial setup?

Another huge plus for SpamTitan is its ease of implementation. You can do it by yourself without any help from SpamTitan support. It's very easy to deploy and configure. The manual is also easy to understand.

I liked it after about two months because we managed to fine tune it and set it correctly. After about two months, I was able to confidently make a decision about buying this product and implement it in our bank. They have added a lot of very useful features since then.

What about the implementation team?

I deployed it myself without any help from anyone. Afterwards, after I deployed it, I had several questions as well as several fine tuning that needed to be done with the spam engine. I opened a case every time and TitanHQ support helped me. 

What was our ROI?

SpamTitan has helped save employees’ time by not having them sort through junk and spam emails. In our environment via group policy, we have disabled junk filters on our mail clients. It is not useful for us anymore. So, it is only being filtered by SpamTitan. 

For our most valuable clients, we have enabled access and they are managing their own whitelist, blacklist, etc. If someone is quite knowledgeable with email clients, we can even deploy the SpamTitan Outlook plugin for them. With this plugin, they can configure their blacklist and whitelist, e.g., marking someone as a whitelisted sender for them only. It is quite a useful feature if you know how Exchange works. If you know what happens when someone blocks someone else via Outlook junk filtering, that is through Active Directory, then it is synchronized with the edge server. So, it is a pain to find where it was blocked.

Our help desk is saving half an hour to an hour. Now, the administrators only need to go to the SpamTitan portal. We have a small group of help desk technicians who are administrators for SpamTitan. They go into the SpamTitan portal looking for history about why something was blocked. This takes three to four times less time when finding out why mail was blocked.

From a price-performance ratio, it is one of the best. It does not cost a lot and does its job just fine. If you fine tune it, it is just ideal.

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

The pricing is ideal. A lot of other anti-spams are integrated in Exchange, counting technical mailboxes that are not sending any emails outside. So, they are not scanned and only for internal communication. SpamTitan only counts the emails that it scans. This is one of the best licensing models that I saw for anti-spam solutions because it is counting dynamically the number of emails that senders are sending. It counts these uniquely by week. It provides a very realistic picture. This is very useful because we are not counting the emails doing inbound or outbound notifications from our company. 

We are considering buying Link Lock, which has an additional fee. I need time to test and trial it, so the purchase is currently on hold.

For a small company, it would be just a great solution because it doesn't cost that much. It is very easy to install and configure. The support is just great. 

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

When we were forced to find something else because Microsoft Forefront ceased to exist, we looked at FortiGuard Antispam, which was quite good as well. We also looked at Barracuda's anti-spam solution, but it was very costly so I didn't even bother to evaluate its functionality.

SpamTitan was quite a reasonably priced solution. When we began to test, we had trials with FortiGuard Antispam and SpamTitan. We didn't manage to test both of them in time. Then, we bought SpamTitan for a year, testing it for a year in a production environment. When you configure the anti-spam solution, it works and isn't $100 million.

This anti-spam catching grid is quite good. It is not perfect, but none of the anti-spam products are perfect. I compared it to several competitors, and it has one of the best anti-spam catch rates. You need to fine tune it because it is not perfect out-of-the-box. It depends on the organization's mail flow going through. I had to fine tune it with their support several times in regards to our mail flow. There are several built-in engines where they are raising or lowering spam confidence levels. Right now, the spam catch rate is quite good for us and much better than Forcepoint ever was.

It is quite a good solution compared to other anti-spam solutions. There are anti-spam solutions with better catch rates.

We had one reason to switch from SpamTitan. One of its antivirus engines was a Kaspersky antivirus engine, which is Russian ex-KGB, though this is no such thing as ex-KGB agents in Russia. When Georgia had a war with Russia, we lost 20% of our territory to them. So, we began to see what products have Russian roots, and SpamTitan had a Kaspersky antivirus engine. Our concern was that Kaspersky could do something wrong with Georgia. I sent an email to SpamTitan and told them, "We are from Georgia and you are using a KGB-operated antivirus engine. We are thinking of switching to another anti-spam solution because of that." They told me that they were planning to switch from Kaspersky. Several months later, they switched to Bitdefender antivirus engine. So, I was very happy to stay with SpamTitan.

What other advice do I have?

I have recommended SpamTitan to six or seven companies who have been using it for several years. They have been very happy with it.

We are not yet using the geo-blocking feature.

I would rate SpamTitan as nine out of 10. However, four years ago, I would have rated it as 10 out of 10. No spam was getting through four years ago. Now, a lot of phishing emails are getting through. The solution should be more precise on phishing emails.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user

About 6 years ago I got hit with at least 70 emails per day. It was part of a scheme to disrupt my regular office duties while the scammer fraudulently purchased over $10, 000 items using my debit card. 

With the help of an IT professional, he recommended Titan-HQ.  It worked like magic and the spam was gone. Even the questionable email goes to a quarantine folder where I am able to release the email I choose.

Titan-HQ sends me every morning a list of quarantined email which makes it so easy to use. Lastly, whenever I had to contact customer service they responded immediately and answered my questions. 

Deployment Manager at NetUniverse
Reseller
Highly customizable filters, robust security, and knowledgeable support staff, with a straightforward setup that takes under 15 minutes
Pros and Cons
  • "The way we can customize filters is excellent. Other solutions tend to be restrictive with their specific profiles, but with SpamTitan, we can create them from scratch."
  • "I believe the product is configured for the US or European market, not the Latin American market, and the scoring system is a little too strict for our market. Most companies in Latin America don't even have proper domain configuration, which can cause their emails to be filtered as spam. They might not have DMARC or SDF configuration, so we often have to change the scoring threshold to let legitimate emails through. It's not SpamTitan's fault, but the optimization isn't the greatest considering our market."

What is our primary use case?

Our clients typically use Office 365 and Google as email providers, and we implement the solution to provide an additional layer of security for incoming emails. It helps with SPF, DMARC, and all the DNS tracers.

One of the main aspects of our business is security; firewalls, web application controls, anti-spams, and so on. We use TitanHQ SpamTitan for some clients in Peru.

As a service provider, we used and tested many brands including Proofpoint Email Protection and Fortinet FortiMail. We like to stick with SpamTitan for anti-spam, because it gives us the least problems and less false positives compared to other solutions. 

How has it helped my organization?

Spoofing prevention is critical. Using the solution as an outgoing filter prevents spoofing, a major issue right now as everyone is getting spoofing emails. The filter for incoming emails works well, perhaps even too well. SpamTitan works with a scoring system; sometimes, we need to adjust the score threshold to allow safe emails through manually. The filter can be a little too much, though it's better to be safe than sorry.

What is most valuable?

The way we can customize filters is excellent. Other solutions tend to be restrictive with their specific profiles, but with SpamTitan, we can create them from scratch.

The solution is straightforward to deploy and very quick to set it up. We can get it to work in five to ten minutes, which is excellent for demonstrating the product to potential clients. Another main factor is the price. I believe it's usually less expensive than all the other solutions.

There was an event two or three months ago where one of our clients had a problem where their domain was spoofed. We solved it by running the outgoing emails through SpamTitan and using the DMARC register. They stopped receiving spoofing emails, which is how we usually solve these problems. 

The solution doesn't just save us time, but money as well. We had a case with one client where their accounting department received spoofed emails requesting all kinds of payments. When we implemented the DMARC configuration for outgoing emails, they were protected. Regarding saving time going through spam emails, I would say an average amount of time is saved because anti-spam isn't the main focus of the solution. Our clients already use Office 365 and Google, which include spam filters for incoming emails. Our primary use for SpamTitan is security, the filter for incoming emails regarding buyers. Anti-spam is a bonus, but we care about security the most, and in terms of security, I would say SpamTitan performs above average. Since implementing the solution, we have received less complaints of false positives from our clients.

What needs improvement?

I believe the product is configured for the US or European market, not the Latin American market, and the scoring system is a little too strict for our market. Most companies in Latin America don't even have proper domain configuration, which can cause their emails to be filtered as spam. They might not have DMARC or SDF configuration, so we often have to change the scoring threshold to let legitimate emails through. It's not SpamTitan's fault, but the optimization isn't the greatest considering our market.  

For how long have I used the solution?

We have been implementing this solution for our clients for four years. 

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability of the solution is excellent; we only had one critical event in the past four years. SpamTitan uses two AVs, and we had an issue with one of them called BitDefender, which gave us false positives for about a week. 

For email solutions, stability is vital. If emails don't get through, it's a significant problem. SpamTitan is excellent in this department, as it prevents those problems, and so are the other cloud providers in the anti-spam segment. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The scalability of the solution could be improved. We can go with a shared node or our own node, which offers a lot more scope for configuration. It would be great to switch between the two without downtime, which isn't possible now. I understand why this could be difficult to deliver, but it would still be an excellent feature to see.

How are customer service and support?

I dealt with support through tickets and over the phone. They pick up the phone, which is great. Other providers get back to me within 24 hours, but SpamTitan is usually quicker if it's within working hours. There may be a few hours a day where they don't offer phone or email support, but that's very late at night and early in the morning. When I speak with their technical support, I get the impression they know what they are talking about, which isn't always the case with other providers.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

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

We used many solutions of this kind, including Fortinet FortiMail and Proofpoint Email Protection. If the client wants an on-premises solution, we implement FortiMail, but that is more of a licensing issue. With an on-premises set-up, the pricing is based on the volume of emails per hour, whereas with cloud-based solutions, the price is based on the number of users or mailboxes. For all cloud-based solutions, we use SpamTitan.

How was the initial setup?

The deployment is straightforward; we change our MX records and do the backend configuration. This is very helpful when we need to demo the product to clients, as we can set it up within 15 minutes. The setup only requires one person, me and maybe another engineer, but one is enough. 

All anti-spam solutions require some tweaking post-deployment. In our case, we often carry out a deployment and track it for the first week because every client has different providers and use cases. For huge clients, that tracking time can increase to a month. 

What was our ROI?

The solution gave us an ROI. The spam filters save us a lot of time, and the antivirus is excellent. We carried out a test in which SpamTitan detected a virus that other solutions didn't, and the DMARC configuration is great for preventing spoofing. This product saves us both time and money.

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

Cloud-based solutions charge per mailbox, which isn't ideal sometimes. A company could have 300 total mailboxes and only 50 in regular use, but they would have to pay the same for all of them. I want a cloud-based solution that gives a price based on the volume of email traffic.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use SpamTitan in the cloud. I believe they have different deployment options, but we only use the cloud solution.

I would love a cloud-based solution that offers the option of volume-based pricing rather than user-based. There are companies and especially government institutions that have 1000 mailboxes but only use 50 or 100 of those on a daily basis. In this scenario, a cloud-based anti-spam solution is very costly.

We don't use the solution's geo-blocking feature at the moment, as we don't require it. 

Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor. The reviewer's company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Integrator/Reseller
PeerSpot user
Andrew Dalman - PeerSpot reviewer
President at ActiveCo
MSP
Their superior service comes at a very cost-effective price
Pros and Cons
  • "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."
  • "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."

What is our primary use case?

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.

How has it helped my organization?

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.

What is most valuable?

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.

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

We have been using it for more than five years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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.

How are customer service and support?

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.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

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

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. 

How was the initial setup?

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. 

What about the implementation team?

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.

What was our ROI?

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.

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

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. 

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

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.

What other advice do I have?

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.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud

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

Other
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor. The reviewer's company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: MSP
PeerSpot user
Ryan Rood - PeerSpot reviewer
Information Technology Manager at Copp's Buildall
Real User
Easy to use as well as add new features and licenses
Pros and Cons
  • "If it can stop all the garbage from getting through, then it is definitely a time saver. It is more protecting our employees than anything. We just want to make sure that we can do everything that we can do to try and prevent people from clicking on bad stuff or having to deal with bad stuff. It is easier to prevent it from coming into the network."
  • "One of the things that I have been asking them to do is add the ability to scan a domain's age. It seems like the majority of spam right now have been registered with brand new domains. They are utilizing and abusing them for two weeks until they make it onto all the blacklists, then they pick a new one. They just move on. So, if we could scan a domain's age, and just say, "Outright block domains that are less than two weeks old," then it would make SpamTitan even better. They absolutely should be doing that. I would love it if they would do that."

What is our primary use case?

We use it for all our companies to essentially filter and secure our email. 

We have about eight companies who are using it, but they are all under one umbrella. It is one system the services multiple locations, so we access it internally through our corporate location where we have about 130 users who are licensed.

How has it helped my organization?

It is nice to have something in-between the Exchange Server. I can do maintenance on my server and still have everything coming through. For the most part, I trust the amount of spam that is being caught. It is very accurate, which is the best way to go. I think they claim 99% emails, or something like that, will be flagged. It is pretty close to that. I don't know if it is exactly 99%. However, for the most part and from what I have seen with other spam systems, it does a great job at trying to catch spam email. We have tweaked the rules over the years to help make it better for our business.

If it can stop all the garbage from getting through, then it is definitely a time saver. It is more about protecting our employees than anything. We just want to make sure that we can do everything that we can do to try and prevent people from clicking on bad stuff or having to deal with bad stuff. It is easier to prevent it from coming into the network.

What is most valuable?

The new Link Lock feature seems to help protect us a bit better than before. We have been pretty happy with it. The Link Lock feature is probably one of the better ones that can help better protect our end users. I know that they are still working on it, so there are some challenges here and there. However, for the most part, the features and functionality are pretty awesome.

It is pretty easy for us to use, add new features, and add licenses.

We use the geo-blocking feature to block by certain country domains. There are a chunk of regions that we just outright drop as soon as they hit the server. This reduces our spam intake by 5% to 10%.

We block .ru, because we have had a huge intake of spam as well as stuff from Japan. Since we don't do anything in those countries, there is no reason for us to be getting email from them. That is why we do it. We just don't have a need for emails to be coming in from those locations.

The geo-blocking feature is easy to use. Some of the users can waitlist. Then, on the admin side, we can also add stuff to completely allow a top-level domain, if we know that we are having some issues with them, and they haven't quite fixed their stuff. It is very easy to do that and use it.

What needs improvement?

One of the things that I have been asking them to do is add the ability to scan a domain's age. It seems like the majority of spam right now have been registered with brand new domains. They are utilizing and abusing them for two weeks until they make it onto all the blacklists, then they pick a new one. They just move on. So, if we could scan a domain's age, and just say, "Outright block domains that are less than two weeks old," then it would make SpamTitan even better. They absolutely should be doing that. I would love it if they would do that.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been an avid user for seven years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

My server has been running non-stop for 675 days. That is my up-time right now. It is very stable, running on a small cluster.

It is very lightweight on the maintenance side. I am in on a daily basis just to monitor it, but generally speaking, it takes care of itself. You don't really have to do a whole lot unless you encounter an issue.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I have seen that they offer MSP and ISP offerings, so I see no reason why it wouldn't be very scalable. However, I have not personally used its scalability.

How are customer service and support?

The support is pretty fantastic when I have had to deal with them. They are easy to use and get in touch with. They resolve things pretty quickly. There are some things that they can do in the background, if their software can't exactly do what you are looking for; they can tweak and modify stuff for us.

I have only ever had one or two issues where I felt like I wasn't getting an appropriate answer, so I ended up opening a phone call ticket. I called in and spoke with somebody, then I was able to get a resolution pretty quickly once I voiced my concern with the solution that was provided.

We are very satisfied with the support. I would rate them as nine out of 10.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

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

All this stuff was coming through Exchange and it wasn't cutting it as an anti-spam. So, we picked SpamTitan after reviewing a couple of different products. Our decision was mainly based on features and functionality as well as price point and flexibility. 

How was the initial setup?

The initial deployment was straightforward.

It took the appropriate amount of effort to set up and configure. It would be nice if there was a bit more guidance in some of the stuff or maybe a hand-on approach for new customers. That might be a good idea. 

What about the implementation team?

I did the setup by myself.

We set it up in-house. We just slowly tweaked things as we went along, opening a support ticket as need. Then, they would make recommendations based on our issue and tell me what I should or shouldn't be doing.

What was our ROI?

We have seen ROI. We continue to purchase it every year.

It has reduced our false positive rate by 90%.

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

The price point is still of a reasonable nature. It is reasonable for the services that they offer. They are very reasonable, and that is one of the factors why we decided on SpamTitan a long time ago.

We recently added on the new Link Lock license.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We also looked at Barracuda.

What other advice do I have?

It is a great product for the price point that you are getting. It has a fantastic value. I would highly recommend it.

SpamTitan is an eight. It is very good. There are small points that they could improve, but they are good at what they do.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
Director Of Information Technology at CBI Group – Culture-Based Interiors
Real User
Saves employees from having to sort through junk and spam email, and drastically improved our security
Pros and Cons
  • "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."
  • "It would be nice if the reporting feature could be updated. Also, the feel of the web interface is a little dated."

What is our primary use case?

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

How has it helped my organization?

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.

What is most valuable?

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,

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

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.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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.

How are customer service and support?

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.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

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

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

How was the initial setup?

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.

What about the implementation team?

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.

What was our ROI?

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.

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

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.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

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.

What other advice do I have?

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.

Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Download our free TitanHQ SpamTitan Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
Updated: October 2024
Buyer's Guide
Download our free TitanHQ SpamTitan Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.