TitanHQ SpamTitan Reviews

We were getting inundated with spam and having a hard time controlling it. Microsoft has tools, but it was getting overwhelming, so we installed SpamTitan. It seems to have taken care of the issue. Right now, I'm only using it for one Exchange server. 

SpamTitan has made it easier to manage spam. When other solutions I've used quarantined something, an admin had to manually find and release it. With SpamTitan, the end-user can monitor it themselves and release their own quarantined items. It's faster and less work. 

It's reduced the amount of time employees spend sorting through junk emails. I can't quantify it precisely, but it probably saves about half an hour a day per user. 

SpamTitan's individual spam reports for end-users is probably the best feature. It saves me time.

Some of the menus on the dashboard could be easier to navigate. It takes a little while to find things. 

I've been using SpamTitan for at least six months.

I haven't had any issues with SpamTitan so far. It seems to be working as advertised.

I only have about 30 users, but I don't imagine there would be a difference with 300 or more. 

I've only had to call TitanHQ for minor things, but they've been very responsive. Their support is much better than the customer service for other solutions I've used. I'd rate TitanHQ nine out of 10. 

Positive

I previously used N-Able's spam solution, but I switched because it didn't give the end-users control over their quarantine or spam. They couldn't review it or release it. Everything had to go through me, so if there was an issue, they'd have to contact me to resolve it. SpamTitan gives them a daily report.

Yeah. I have used a similar product. This one's far better. I mean, the last one I used the deployment was horrible, and it was just convoluted.

Deploying SpamTitan was straightforward. I don't need to do much. I only had to change the MX records, then make a couple changes in my send and receive connectors on my Exchange server. It took around 20 minutes to set everything up.

I had some support from TitanHQ.

My customers are happy, and I'm reselling it, so I make a little bit of money. It's low-effort because I seldom have to do anything with it. It's passive income for me. I charge my customer for the anti-spam services and pay SpamTitan, then charge my customer more than I'm paying.

I looked at other things, but I went ahead and signed up for SpamTitan as soon as I evaluated it.

I'd give it a 10 out of 10. I'd recommend it to anyone. There's no reason not to use it. It's easy and cheap.

It allows me to help my clients prevent bad stuff coming onto their network. It does security spam filtering, searching where it came from and whether it is spam or whatever. It also scans attachments, URLs, and addresses in the emails, then puts it in a quarantine. It is part of the tools in my suitcase of things which can help my client keep their network clean.

We are using it at Arcadia Ambulance. Other clients that I have use it as well. Further usage is definitely on the horizon, as needed. It really depends on who wants to use it. Pricing can be a decider.

It provides insurance for cybersecurity, which is required for a lot of clients. There is peace of mind, knowing that their network will be a bit more secure.

Sometimes, sources considered spam try to attack the client who has put in a filter. I don't know what they are trying to do, as they might be violating SPF records or attempting DMARC DNS violations. This solution prevents that spam from coming in. The client can then see that in their digest on a daily basis.

The digest and the quarantine are the most valuable features. I can go into the quarantine and see everything that was quarantined. On an individual basis, you can easily whitelist an email or address coming in, if needed.

The user interface experience is easy and intuitive. I don't think I have ever run into a situation where I don't know how to do something or don't know where something is at, then calling up someone at SpamTitan. The product is a little more powerful and user-friendly now at Arcadia Ambulance, then when I used it as Arcadia Ambulance. 

SpamTitan is easy to navigate. It is in a format that the end user can understand. I don't really need to handhold clients who are using it. They understand it is very intuitive. If an email comes in, and they don't want that to come in, then they can block the email as an email that they don't want to receive. It is fairly easy for them to navigate and manage the spam filter service.

I am not sure it does URL filtering or checks for phishing, but if it does, then great. That would probably be my room for improvement. I would like it to check for DCIN violations from locations where the email is being sent. Also, I would like it to do sandboxing, e.g., if an attachment is on an email, then it opens that at a different location to ensure that file attachment does not have any malicious aspects to it.

There is some room for improvement. Some of the biggest ones are better scanning of emails coming from what source and scanning emails for the content in the email. For example, determining if the email has malicious content in it by scanning the email and attachment. If it does that, then great, but that is very important to my clients and me. It is very important that you know what is in an email before it gets into an office's location. Not only where it is coming from, but what is in it, which is probably more important than where it is coming from. It could be coming from a client's partner or a business that they work with, but what if they get compromised? The perpetrators or bad guys start sending emails to Arcadia Ambulance, and they are infected with scripts and bad stuff. They think, "Okay, this is a legit user," since they get emails from them all the time, then they get hit. That is how a lot of really bad stuff happens.

The stability of SpamTitan is equivalent to other email security solutions that I have previously used. Some of them have more bells and whistles that you can add. For example, inside the email subject line, you can put in the words encrypt secret, or secure. Then, it will automatically secure that email and send an email to the person who is supposed to receive it. They can identify it for themselves in a series of different Q&A questions. That is sometimes a deciding factor for clients.

I have used it in the past, quite a bit, at another company where the solution was sold. I was reselling it indirectly through another distributor and TitanHQ was hosting it on their server. That was different because Arcadia Ambulance is using it directly through TitanHQ.

It just gets it done. It could probably be improved with more options being provided. For example, being able to hold emails that come in for up to 30 days, so if an email is lost or whatever, you can go and read it again. Seeing emails for each individual is a feature that could be provided for both incoming and outgoing, almost like a cached copy of every email coming in and out.

There are 10 to 15 users using this solution. This includes finance, management, payroll, billing, and the assistance department. The assistance department assists in routing patients to their ambulance, e.g., where they will be picked up. They also address any issues that might come up, such as how long it will take the driver to arrive. It looks at traffic patterns and helps the ambulance get there, if they need help.

TitanHQ technical support is knowledgeable, but sometimes not accessible because they are a UK company. Sometimes when I need help, they might not be available to help me. I would rate them as eight out of 10.

The expertise, attentiveness, and speed of response from TitanHQ’s customer support team is pretty good compared to competing solutions’ customer support teams. It is equivalent.

Positive

Arcadia Ambulance previously didn't have anything. Therefore, when it came time to update their cybersecurity insurance, we helped implement SpamTitan, which met all the requirements. Before, it would sometimes go into the junk folder inside of Outlook.

It wasn't too difficult to set up and configure SpamTitan. I had to change the DNS, then configure and enable it for all the end users who would be using it. That wasn't very difficult at all. I actually did it by myself, then I had a conference call with a tech support person who double checked my settings and that my configuration was done correctly. So, it was fairly easy. It took about one or two hours.

I did have to talk to my boss at Arcadia and answer a few questions. Believe it or not, my email address was blocked so he had to unblock it.

I can make a lot of money reselling it. 

Partner profitability is good with Titan HQ's partner program. This means that I recommend it to clients who trust me. My time and effort to educate them is compensated by TitanHQ, who provides the solution to me at a lower price than what the public gets it at, then I can make some money.

My business is more secure. In which case, I am up all the time. I have fewer vulnerabilities, which is important. That is my return on investment for getting SpamTitan's spam filter. If I don't have it, then I could have large bills for resolving and correcting the damage that was done.

I just say, "The pricing is X amount per month and per mailbox."

TitanHQ is all over the world, and not all solutions are global. TitanHQ sees what is happening globally, adding to their experience and knowledge.

SpamTitan has helped improve my spam catch rate and reduce my false positive rate amongst the services that I use. For example, I use a firewall and most clients scan files, attachments, and data coming in and out. I don't use just one solution, but many different ones, so there is overlap.

I tell someone looking into this solution that it has a series of different security functions or features, then I inform them of other options out there.

Don't always assume that it does what you think it does. Clarify and ask questions. Ask if it can do other things besides the things that it currently does.

I would rate the solution as seven and a half out of 10.

We are an IT consulting company. We use SpamTitan for clients, that prefer an on-premise option instead of the cloud. Due to strict requirements and security concerns using the cloud is prohibited so they need to protect their servers in-house email servers.

We always use a multi-tiered approach when it comes to designing and securing our clients email environments and SpamTitan is one of the products that we use. When email comes in, it is first scanned at the firewall, then it is passed onto SpamTitan. SpamTitan checks it again and then forwards it to the email server.

For the past four years, this solution is working well and our clients are satisfied with our approach.

Spam and viruses have gone down to almost zero it works very well for that reason, it is also very simple to use and supports clustering. Clustering is a major benefit because it eliminates single points of failures. If one of the gateways fails the other takes over without any disruption.

Very effective in blocking spam and viruses and can be deployed as an appliance. SpamTitan supports clustering thus eliminating single points of failure. The geo-blocking feature is good to have, to protect against offending countries and the user interface is clean and very simple to use and works quite well. Customized report generation is excellent and the product is very easy to maintain.

They need to keep up with the latest technology and add new features as they arise, e.g., artificial intelligence, new and improved updated lists, or new ways of tracking spam. They need to just keep up so the product is effective. Because, if all of a sudden viruses or spam starts getting through, then we might have to look at something else. However, so far, it has kept up and done a great job. So, we are happy.

I have been using it for about four years.

We make sure all the updates get updated and tested. Other than that, the maintenance is minimal. It does most of the work for us.

For the past four years, it has been rock solid. There have been absolutely no issues with it.

Its ability to integrate with other systems has been great. On the back end, my client uses Exchange so that hasn't been an issue. On the front end, with the firewall, it also hasn't been an issue. It is very transparent in how it works. The information gets passed to it, then it does its job and passes it to the next node, i.e., email. The other way around, it also does the same thing. So, it works quite well with other third-party products. There are no integration issues.

They are a smaller company, so it was more difficult to get a hold of them. However, once that relationship was established, because of their smaller size, they are willing to work more with resellers. Therefore, it has been a good relationship since then.

We have never had to use the tech support since the solution has been rock-solid. We have been very happy with it. There is a feature from within the GUI where you can directly contact them, then they can take a look at your configuration or try to solve the issue. That is a good feature to have, but we haven't had the need to use it. 

Positive

In the past, our client had a lot of problems with spam on their emails. Therefore, we implemented a multi-tiered approach.

This solution replaced another product from Symantec that was being phased out by our client. SpamTitan was very easy to set up. It took some time integrated with some of the other backend systems but once the tweaking and fine tuning phase was completed everything worked well without any problems. Now, it is almost set it and forget it. There is just basic maintenance and monitoring going forward.

Implementation was done in-house.

SpamTitan has helped tremendously by saving employees’ time, not having to sort through junk and spam emails. Clients are very happy with the product. It solves their problem. In the morning, the IT administrator checks out a quick report that he runs every night. He then makes sure everything is working fine, and that is it. So, it does not take a lot of time for him to monitor and administer it. It is set it and forget it because it does its job.

The pricing model was one of the reasons that we selected it. The solution was very effective at what it did and it was very cost-effective. My client saved in the 30% to 40% range by installing it, so the pricing is competitive.

We evaluated different products. During the evaluation phase, this was one of the best products out there. We made the recommendation to our client, installed it, and they have been very happy ever since.

I would rate it as a solid eight out of 10 because there is always room for improvement. However, the solution has been solid.

We use it as an email security gateway to filter out spam and any malicious software that is often hidden in emails. We also use their feature for scanning links in emails to make certain that nothing gets to the end-user and invite them to click on a malicious site and download some nasty software.

I'm an systems integrator and consultant and I use it for two of my clients who have on-premise Exchange Servers. 

One of the biggest benefits of being a partner of TitanHQ is their support, which  has been excellent, the few times that I've had to use them. They've solved any problems quickly. The price is also fairly reasonable and that makes it easy to integrate into smaller businesses. Also, its ease of use is a big benefit as I don't have to spend a lot of time managing it. It's mostly self-managing, once it's set up and configured. It allows me to do the many other things that I need to do.

Overall, SpamTitan has blocked spam by 99 percent. So it's a very rare instance that a user at either location will complain that some spam has gotten through.

It has resulted in happy end-users. Most people live in their inboxes these days. Having a clean inbox certainly makes everybody more productive, saving time and money. It certainly does for me, during my busy day, as well.

There are two things that make it really attractive to end-users. The first is their ability to manage their own spam queues via the end-user reports. It allows them to determine if there are any false-positives. Ultimately, every solution has false positives, but enabling the users to handle that aspect allows me to spend less time managing it. That's the most valuable feature for me.

The second is that the price is fairly reasonable. Those aspects make it an inviting solution for clients looking to protect their environments, especially because we know that email is the number-one source of hacking these days.

I also use the built-in geo-blocking feature quite extensively. I ran a report on one of the sites to see how much geo-blocking was happening, and I was quite surprised that there was a lot. I've looked at where the majority of spam was coming from, in terms of IPs, and put in blocks on those, as well as on the obvious ones such as North Korea and, certainly, Russia these days. The report I ran showed me there is a lot of potential for compromise and a lot of malicious actors in those locations.

The user interface is good, but it could use some improvement. There's a little bit of an issue with certain feature not coexisting with another feature that has similar functionality. But once you get to know it, it actually is quite simple and quite quick to navigate, and find the settings you're looking for.

The UI is a little dated-looking as well. Other than that, it seems to do the job that I require it to do, and does it quite well.

We're coming up to our first renewal for TitanHQ SpamTitan.

I was surprised that it has been very stable. Other than for updates, I have not had to restart the appliance and have not had to do much tweaking of it. Once it's installed and running, it just runs and does its job.

It's more stable than Symantec was. I found that Symantec did need to be rebooted fairly often to keep it running properly. To be fair, that was an older product and I don't know what their current offering is like.

One of my locations has 100 users, so it's not excessively large. I know that there are locations using the solution that have many thousands of users. For the number of users that I need it to protect, it does a very good job.

In terms of increasing usage of SpamTitan, I don't deal with too many locations that use an on-premises Exchange Server anymore. Everybody's going to the cloud, so at this point in time I don't have any plans to increase usage.

I haven't had to use their support too often, perhaps half a dozen times at most, but in each instance, they've been very proficient and quick to respond. I would rate them at nine out of 10. I don't want to say they're perfect, but they're close to it in my experience.

Prior to SpamTitan I was using a competing product from Symantec. TitanHQ's support is far superior to anything that I experienced with Symantec.

Positive

The Symantec email gateway is a product I used previously. Although very powerful, but it has a very convoluted and difficult to use UI. It was extremely non-intuitive. So to find the settings for the change that I needed to make took an extremely long time. And in a lot of instances it didn't actually do what I was hoping it would do. Although the SpamTitan interface is a little dated, once you get familiar with it, it's easier to navigate and to find the setting that you need to adjust.

Another important feature is the ease with which it was set up, configured, and ready to go. It took very little time to get the solution up and running.

To set up the virtual machine, the whole thing was up and running within an hour, perhaps a little more. There is certainly a little tweaking and fine-tuning that takes place within the first several days and weeks. But once that's done, it's pretty much self-maintaining. The odd time I'll check for updates and false positives, but other than that, it's pretty good.

I have definitely seen ROI from using SpamTitan. The amount of time required to maintain the product is very minimal and that has allowed me to dedicate my time and resources to other projects. Being an integrator and system admin, the more projects I do, the more money I make

In addition, because of its effectiveness in dealing with spam and malicious emails, it has enabled my end-users to be more productive as well. It has definitely increased their ROI.

The pricing of SpamTitan is about right. It's not over-priced per user. It's not super cheap either, but it is a very good product and they certainly deserve to make some money on it.

I looked at Barracuda and a few others whose names I don't recall right now. Although they were very good reputation-wise, they were very pricey for my use cases.

Anybody who is looking for an email security gateway product should give SpamTitan a very serious look. Even when comparing it to some of the big names out there, like Barracuda and Symantec, SpamTitan stands head and shoulders above some of them, and that is certainly true given the price.

We use it to eliminate spam and viruses coming in. We wanted a solution that would filter out spam and work with O365. That was also easy to deploy and cost-effective.

We have it deployed for all our users as our spam filter for all our emails.

It cuts down a lot of our spam since about half our emails are spam.

I like the daily reports that go to our users. They are very user-friendly, easy to use, and basically transparent.

The user interface experience is very good. It sends a report to everybody's email. They can look at all the spam and use a simple button to click and delete. The quarantine reports are really simple to use.

SpamTitan's overall intuitiveness is very good. I like it a lot. 

I really like the impersonation feature of SpamTitan. We used to get emails pretending to be other users. This solution is smart enough to filter out using name filtering. If I want, I could block based on our CEO and president's name. Then, if an email came from them, the solution makes sure it is internal and not somebody who is external trying to spoof their name.

I would like the ability to have users be able to send the reports more than once a day or specify when they get their spam report, since I don't think we can schedule that.

I have been using it for a little over a year. I just renewed it.

The stability has been rock-solid. Compared to my previous solution, stability is the same. I have never had a problem with stability. It has never been down.

It worked really well to implement it into our O365. It implements really well and is super easy to use.

We have implemented it company-wide. We are not a huge company, but it was easy enough to have it filtering for every user.

The support has been excellent. Compared to some of the other products that I have used, it has been far superior. Their response time has been phenomenal. It is super fast. I have used Barracuda in the past and the interface to SpamTitan is so much easier than that. It far exceeds everything. In my opinion, the support is probably one of the best and I would rate it as 10 out of 10.

Positive

I was previously using Barracuda. It was a hosted platform and costly. It was hard to use comparatively. So, I was looking for a more cost effective solution and came across SpamTitan when searching Google. When I got a hold of them, we set up the demo. They were super-friendly and it was super easy to set up the demo. They took me through how it all worked and gave me a 30-day trial. Within the first two weeks of the trial, I said, "Let's buy it," because it was that great and worked that well for us.

I really like the ease of setup. This was very important to our organization when deciding to go with SpamTitan because I wanted something that would be easy for us to implement and our users could easily adapt to it.

It took probably 10 minutes to deploy. The ease of deployment was very impressive. 

The people from TitanHQ who helped us implement it were super-friendly. It was super easy to do.

We have absolutely seen ROI in the sense of getting back time. SpamTitan has absolutely helped save employees’ time by not having to sort through junk and spam emails.

Their pricing is really good for what it does.

SpamTitan offered a demo of it. I liked the key features: 

• The impersonation feature. 
• The ease of adding to blacklists. 
• Whitelisting emails from vendors. 
• The interface was so much better all around for users to access. 
• It is very intuitive. 
• The speed to implement was awesome. 

Overall, it was cost, speed to implement, the impersonation to blocking, and then the ability to maintain the blacklist and whitelists. That has been so much easier than anything else.

I would advise other people to buy the solution. Don't mess around - buy the tool and you will be happy. I am.

It was simple to implement. It has been very cost effective. It seems to be working very well for us.

We do stuff all over the world, so we don't use the geo-blocking feature.

So far, I would rate it as 10 out of 10. It really has been phenomenal for what I am using it for. I love it, which is why I have no problem giving a review. I just recently bought another one of their products, SafeTitan, because of the love of this solution. That is how happy I have been with TitanHQ.

Out of 1,000 emails sent to us, about 800 to 850 of them are blocked for one reason or another. The amount of spam, phishing, and junk that comes through email is just incredible.

The name of the game is identifying spam. The biggest area of concern for us is what it flags as spam but it's not really clear that it's spam. A definite benefit for us is being able to identify that in a customized way. We can make that header say whatever we want it to say. Right now, it says "Potential Spam," which jumps at our users. They say, "Oh, potential spam. I have to take a closer look at this." That has been a really big improvement for us. It's a simple feature, but it has really made a big difference in helping to identify possible spam for our users.

In addition, being on the admin side and seeing what is completely blocked and, I can definitely say it has saved a lot of time. The amount of email that our users don't get, email that is just solid junk, is staggering. I find it utterly amazing how much stuff doesn't need to come through and that is blocked. Not having to go through up to 80 junk emails out of 100 emails today equates directly to time savings. We have 35 users. SpamTitan probably saves each one of them 10 to 15 minutes per day, pretty easily. Multiply 10 to 15 minutes by 35 users, seven days a week, and there are significant time savings.

One of the most valuable features is that it's very straightforward. It's a really simple interface. With our previous products, you could spend a week, if not more, training on those products just to figure out the interface. With SpamTitan it took an hour or two or three, tops. Most of the time you find things on your own. SpamTitan's interface is designed to do just what you need to do and not a lot more.

We are using the geo-blocking because we don't do any work outside of the United States. We simply don't need to receive anything from .ru or .cn. I look at where the security risks are and, obviously, Russia, China, and Argentina are on that top-10 list for hacking attempts and spam. The ability to very definitively block those definitely helps out a lot.

We do have a select set of domains and websites that we do want to receive. We want to make sure that they get through. Some of them were initially blocked as spam so we added them to the filter and now they come through just fine. Others that we specifically do not want to receive from can be easily blocked, so that we don't have to worry about them as well. It's a very simple interface.

While I haven't looked specifically at how much the geo-blocking is blocking, I would estimate it is somewhere in the 40 to 50 percent range. It is almost like a "pre-block." It's that first level, eliminating emails we definitely don't want.

If the interface made it a bit easier to get to a training library that might be beneficial. Obviously, their techs have access to something like that. If they were to share that, I might be able to go to find the answer myself.

Also, the interface could be updated a little bit. I definitely wouldn't want it to be more complex, but I would like to see it a little bit more polished. And if I had to actually find a negative, it would be the speed. I wish that the interface were faster. We have very fast internet, but there is definitely some sluggishness between pages on the interface. Does that deter me? No. I just wish it were quicker.

We have been on TitanHQ SpamTitan for about a year and a half.

We haven't had any problems with its stability. There haven't been any outages. 

I have one issue that is still pending and it relates to how SpamTitan blocks things connected to voicemail inside of Microsoft Teams. The only reason I say it's still an issue is because it's at a high technical level and there are a lot of areas of it that are not my areas of expertise. I'm having to rely on high-level techs from SpamTitan and from Microsoft. We also have a consultant that we deal with on the Teams side. Trying to narrow that issue down is tough. But it's not an issue of stability. It's related more to settings.

Overall SpamTitan has been a very solid product so far.

When I need assistance, all I have to do is reach out. They are pretty responsive. In the past, we had to file a ticket or call in at a certain time. The plan we had would determine how long it would take to get a response.

With Mimecast, you had to have your customer number, and then call a certain number, and then launch your ticket. After that, they would have to verify which department it goes to. Somebody would try to call you and, of course, you had to be available. We haven't really had that experience on SpamTitan. I can quickly send an email and say, "Hey, I'm struggling with this," and they get back to me pretty quickly. Or I can dial in and just say, "Hey, I'm having a problem. Is there somebody available that might be able to walk me through, finding this particular answer that I need?"

If I had to compare SpamTitan with Mimecast, with SpamTitan I would be expecting an answer within an hour or two. If it was something that needed to be researched, if it was a little more complex, I would expect to hear from them within 24 hours. With Mimecast, I wasn't even getting a response for 24 to 48 hours, and that was just the initial reply. At times, those issues stretched out to take a week or longer to resolve.

Every company has room for improvement. With SpamTitan, I'd love to see a chat feature, even if it's not 24/7/365 and only available during core business hours. I recognize it's tough, with a product that can be used internationally, to know what those core hours look like. But if they had core hours in the US of 8:00 to 5:00 where you could chat with live tech support and say, "I'm really struggling with this. Can you help me out?" That would be good. If you could Get a quick answer without having to pick up the phone, so you could be working on other things at the same time, that would be awesome.

On the sales side, I'm a firm believer in a vendor doing checkups. I'd like to see that salesperson reach out every three months to simply say, "How are things going? Is there anything else we can do? Is there anything that's challenging you? Is there anything that you're looking for that we don't have?" Not only could they get some valuable feedback to help improve their product, and learn about different things that they might want to add in the future, but it would also keep their customers. If I were to say I'm struggling with something it would be great to have them say, "Let me help you get the answer you need," or "I've had some experience with that before. Here's what you need to do."

We are a SpamTitan Plus customer and we have been looking at two additional products out there. They might play into our 2023 budget. If the salesperson checks in, you never know where a sales lead is going to come from. And it would keep the customer happy too.

Positive

We were Mimecast customers in the past and let's just say we had what I would call a "ransom event" with them. They said we needed to pay them a large sum of money or they would not turn our email back on. We, of course, needed our email. At that point we decided that if that's the way they were going to do business, we were going to move away.

Once we made the investment in SpamTitan we were up and running literally in half an hour or an hour, and had fully moved away from Mimecast. The transition went very well.

There was very little to do in terms of the setup. I walked through it with them over the phone. We had a couple of MX records changes to make on our end to make sure that things would flow properly and, once those were done, we were able to see the results almost immediately. 

We have had to make a few changes to the system for things like sensitivity levels for spam. You can adjust it up and down as to how sensitive you want to be. At first, we were a little bit too sensitive, so we dialed it down a little bit.

We also made some changes to what our users would see, once spam was identified. For example, there is spam that is very definitively spam and we get rid of it. Then there's that "middle zone" where we're not really sure whether something is spam or not. It might fit some of the spam criteria, but it might be valid. And then there is the "definitely not spam," and we have it come through. We made some changes to that middle area so that our users could see that it is potential spam, and that they need to look at it to determine whether it is or not. The only complaint they had was the identifier on the header. If they choose to respond, the header stays and they have to remove that manually. But beyond that, it has really done a good job for us.

We did a very quick search of what products were out there. SpamTitan has a unique name to it, but it rose to the top of the search engines that we were looking at. My CEO and I decided to give it a shot.

At the time, we needed to find a solution on short notice. Because of SpamTitan's rating and the fact that its price point was affordable to us, it seemed to fit the niche for us. 

There were some alternatives out there but they were very time-consuming. We needed something and we needed it "right now." SpamTitan was able to come into the picture and be up and running in a very short period of time. With the previous products we had, there were so many pages to go through and so many settings and so many options for customization. It was very confusing and very time-consuming. With SpamTitan, the settings are very easy and intuitive.

The fact that SpamTitan is very simple can be both good and bad. It's good in terms of setting it up, monitoring it, and making the changes that you need to make. Doing those things is very straightforward. The bad side is that sometimes you want a more granular level, but the more granular it gets, obviously, the more time-consuming and the more specialized it gets.

For example, if there is a specific company where some of their emails are good and some of their emails are bad, that might be a little bit tougher to implement with SpamTitan. We might have to identify the ones to block by specific email addresses, as opposed to specifying the domain with certain criteria.

That said, blocking at that level gets really intricate, in general. It might take me two or three calls with a technician on the Mimecast side to write that specific rule, whereas, on the SpamTitan side, it's a little bit more straightforward. We don't get to that level very often, as those situations are few and far between. SpamTitan is easy. It doesn't take long to go in and find what you want and that's what we like about it. You can identify what you need to change and put it in place in minutes as opposed to hours or days.

We use it for inbound and outbound email pre-filtering, before emails reach our MS 365 environment.

Since we started using SpamTitan we've received some 22 million email messages and it has filtered out about 28 percent of all emails before they even got to a user. That decreases the overall amount of either malicious or innocuous spam. It also helps us block spam with explicit malicious intent. It's helped our business reduce our overall risk profile and helped increase our users' effectiveness in receiving and responding to email. It's pretty effective across the board.

In terms of the amount of time it saves a user, I am probably one of the top-five spam recipients within our organization. I would get 300 to 400 spam messages a week, at least. There is now a lot less chatter in my inbox.

The most valuable features are the 

• reporting
• overall filtering functionality

The reporting interface is quite simple and intuitive and provides all of the information that one would need.

The user interface is an eight out of 10. The user interface for regular users is quite intuitive. The email report that they receive is pretty self-explanatory. The online interface for administrators is simple yet really quite effective. It's really a set-it-and-forget-it, and everything is available when needed.

The documentation provided is very rudimentary. The tool itself is very easy to use, also very rudimentary. The quarantine email message that users get on a scheduled basis is something users generally don't pay attention to, like every other communication they get from IT. The formatting of the quarantined email report that goes to the users on a regular basis is a little confusing for them. That could be improved.

And that makes user communication and user training, up front, paramount to ensuring that the tool works, so that a critical email is not being blocked by the spam filtering tool.

I have been using TitanHQ SpamTitan for two years.

It's reliable and stable. I believe it is actually hosted in AWS, so it is impacted by the global AWS outages, but overall it is stable and reliable.

We've grown 100 percent since we started with SpamTitan and we have had no issues with scalability, volume, spam volume, filtering volume, whitelist volume, et cetera. And there have been no issues with reporting and doing metrics. It's completely scalable.

We have a little over 600 people using it, and maintenance requires one-tenth of an FTE. It is used extensively in our organization, across the board.

We haven't really engaged their technical support.

Positive

We used manual mail filtering rules in Office 365. The stability of SpamTitan versus our previous solution is like night and day. SpamTitan is a solution geared specifically towards email filtering, instead of manually creating new rules and extensively customizing those rules for all of the potential variants.

The stability and dependability of email security are very important for our organization. It's one of those behind-the-scenes tools that we view as incredibly important. A user may not even know that it's there, but they know that the majority of the spam is not coming through.

The deployment took minutes. It was an easy, seamless process.

Our deployment strategy included developing communication for explaining to users how to

• receive and review quarantine message reports
• set individual user settings
• report messages 
• retrieve and unblock from a list.

We then picked a date and we turned it on. It took minutes to actually enable it. You can set it up in advance and all you have to do is move your MX record over to SpamTitan and it's on and running.

Find exactly what you want out of the tool and ensure that the options it provides are what you want, and then look at the price. In our case, we made the decision to go with SpamTitan because we didn't want all the other bells and whistles that Mimecast had. We have since subscribed to other tools that do the things that Mimecast also does, but the aggregated price of those other tools is still cheaper than Mimecast.

Look at what you really want, what you really have to have, and how those things are integrated across the board, and then make your decision.

There is a stepped-up version of SpamTitan, that some users may like, called SpamTitan Plus. It doesn't significantly increase the cost but it does provide some extra features. We get those features elsewhere, so we're not subscribing to them.

We looked at Mimecast. Everything we looked at gave us the same kinds of features. Maybe one had a more polished interface or portal, but based on the complexity and usability of the portal and the overall price, SpamTitan was a clear winner.

The biggest lesson we've learned as a result of using this solution is in the area of user communication and the usability of the tool for end-users. Those aspects are incredibly important.

SpamTitan is just one tool in our tool belt but it's very effective at its job. It's quite simple to filter inbound and outbound email based on rules and public ratings for spam centers and originators.

Our primary use case is filtering incoming emails.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have been using TitanHQ SpamTitan for approximately five years.

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

We have not rebooted our server for five years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.