TitanHQ SpamTitan Reviews

The geo-blocking is doing a very good job. I look at our SIEM to see from which countries we're getting attempted logins through Office 365. I started to correlate that with places we were getting spam from, like Brazil. We were also getting a fair amount of stuff coming in from the usual suspects, like China and North Korea. But Brazil was unexpected. I never would have guessed that there's a large hacking community down there, or machines there that are owned by hackers in other countries. The geo-blocking is important for reducing the exposure that we have.

For example, we can geo-block something and then we don't have to inspect a blocked email for a virus. Before we enabled geo-blocking, we were getting embedded viruses, and it was catching those, but now that's being caught by the geo-blocking feature.

Because our end-users are not getting spam, I'm not getting messages where people say, "I think this is spam. What do you think?" I used to get something like that six or eight times a day, so SpamTitan has definitely helped save time.

And in comparison to our previous solution from Barracuda, SpamTitan has reduced our spam by a factor of three.

I'd read that the portal software was dated from the UI perspective, but when I use it, it is very logically laid out. That is one of the things I like. I'm able to get to what I need to very quickly and manage it efficiently. Once I understood the model of how they were doing things, it was very easy to work with.

In addition, I looked at the reporting and about one-third of things that come are not spam, but they are blocked and they need to be blocked because of our rule sets. They're failing DMARC; SPF records are nonexistent. Another valuable feature is "nonexistent recipient." That eliminates a lot of noise that we would get, such as things coming in for former employees. We just don't need that mail.

The training for end-users could be improved. I would like to see a video that says, "Here's the solution and what it will look like." It would be helpful if they had something like that to set expectations.

For example, some of our end-users would go in and delete a message through the solution but they didn't know there was a popup that was part of that process. They weren't allowing popups. And then they couldn't understand why the message they had deleted was still in their mailbox when they knew that they had deleted it.

There was a disconnect regarding how things function, so they need something to show the end-user, very simply, what to expect and how you do things. They have it documented in text and with screenshots, and we went through that, but these days all of our training is done with short, three-minute videos, and people prefer that. They're not going to read anything.

We've been using TitanHQ SpamTitan in earnest for 60 to 90 days. We were testing it for about three months before that.

The stability is good. 

My concern is about what would happen if it goes down. Is it load-balanced? Is there a cluster on the other end or is this just one single server? As a mortgage bank, email is critical and everything is time-sensitive. If that's an option, or it's something that is built-in, I'm not aware of it.

From what I'm looking at, it's probably a single server having fault tolerance with two nodes. I come from regional banks and international companies and we always have multiples for failover. We're a small company and I don't know that we could afford that kind of redundancy, but I haven't had a discussion with TitanHQ about what that would look like or what it would cost. I could bring that to our executives and say, "Is this something that would be valuable given the cost?" If they were to say no, and then we had an outage, it could get expensive on our end.

The support hours are tough for U.S.-based companies like ours, because they're in Europe. They did tell me that they're opening a support office in the U.S. There is, currently, some overlap in support, but it's difficult to get real-time support and, a lot of the time, I just need a quick answer.

That could be improved. It's not an untenable situation but it is a little bit frustrating when I've got users saying, "Hey, I need this or that," and I really need to know how to configure it.

When I do get somebody in support, they're on top of it and they do a great job, but sometimes there's a delay in getting a response.

I had to become familiar with all the different features, and how they classified things a little bit differently. But they do a good job on the help desk side of it. We had a couple of issues where the documentation wasn't there and they agreed. Two days later I was on their help site and I saw that they had built a more specific page for that. It was really encouraging that they're on top of it.

The quality of the support is great. The people I've worked with are great. It's the timeliness. Sometimes it takes a little while, going back and forth, to get the right person.

For Barracuda support we went through a service provider and it typically took a day or two before we would get a response, so SpamTitan is much better.

But compared to other companies, SpamTitan is on par with what we would get from Microsoft or Cisco, given that we are a regional bank and a larger account. With those companies, I can usually get a hold of somebody on the phone within an hour to four hours. With SpamTitan, it is mostly through email, back and forth. That means there are some delays. Sometimes, being able to talk to somebody and just say what I need to do would be better than doing it through emails.

The best support I've ever gotten, as a reference point, has been from Nutanix. That might be a model that they want to look at. I got better support from Nutanix on products that weren't even theirs. I had problems with VMware and their engineers helped solve the problem, which really engendered my confidence in their product.

Our company has been doing managed service for 10 years with two different service providers. My job was to come in and stand up an internal IT department because they weren't happy with the services. I've been in IT for over 40 years and I typically fulfill a CTO role and help companies get their IT functioning during a major merger or acquisition. My current company is constantly in a merger and acquisition phase.

I looked at the products that our company was using but, because there was no IT department, we weren't really getting value out of those products. In all fairness, the products weren't configured optimally for this company. I said, "Well, this is an opportunity to look at something more cost-effective."

We landed on TitanHQ's SpamTitan.

We were using Barracuda, which is not a bad product. But we weren't set up with any portals so I couldn't see anything. We were getting an inordinate amount of spam and targeted spam. I was just unhappy with the company overall. I decided I had to put my own stuff in and just forklift everything else out.

Overall, the setup was very good. 

The exception was creating the proper certificate. We couldn't get it working properly. So SpamTitan created the certificate but it doesn't function properly because we still get an error message that people have to bypass. This is part of what I was talking about with the end-users getting a popup. It's like when you go to a webpage and the certificate is out of date. Our end-users are getting that error message because the certificate doesn't function properly. They thought the site was broken and I said, "No, you can bypass it. We trust this site. This is 'our site.'"

This issue with their certificate has caused a lot more communication between my team and the end-users where we have to say, "No, really, this is okay," because in general, we've trained them to not bypass messages like that. In this particular case, we know it's something we have to fix. That part of it wasn't clear in the documentation.

I've got a call tomorrow with the SpamTitan support team and I'll talk to them about getting this fixed because it is the only problem that we have right now.

When I talked to Barracuda from the licensing perspective, it was not as competitive as what I would have liked. We're a smaller company with about 130 employees.

Also, in a meeting with my senior management, they said that my prediction that we were going to get more spam temporarily until the SpamTitan machine learning had completed was true, but they also said they thought it was going to take much longer. Within about a week, things had settled down and they said we are getting a lot less spam than we used to with our previous solution.  

We still have SpamTitan in learning mode and one of the things that I did at the beginning was to log in every day and look at all the email. When something was obviously spam I took care of it in the back end so that end-users don't have to deal with it. This week, when I looked at it, I didn't see anything that I needed to take action on. It's doing a very good job of properly identifying things.

At first, my senior management were apprehensive about SpamTitan, but now they are saying that they feel they are in control of spam. The way SpamTitan works is a little bit different because, with Barracuda, they were getting hourly updates about quarantined mail. When I told them they were only going to get updates once a day, but they could go check, they thought that was going to be more impactful, but for most people it has resulted in less noise. Our end-users are comfortable with it and it's working really well.

In our business, we get bulk notifications from different companies about the current interest rates, sometimes two or three times a day from the same company, and they go to 20 or 30 or more recipients who are our loan officers. Our end-users like that they can go into the quarantine and clear those. After a while, they'll either create a folder for those updates or they'll just say, "I don't need this anymore and I'm going to block it." They like the fact that they're all managing that independently. That's not to say they couldn't do so with Barracuda, but it required logging into a portal and knowing how to sort things. Now, it's in an email and, right from that email, they can block or allow those  messages independently.

A few people in our organization didn't like it, but I said, "Look, you can just open this email and click a button and, within about 30 seconds, you'll have an email that says, "This is everything that's currently in quarantine." It's easier than having to use a browser, log in to a portal, and do that. That saves them a little time.

Overall, SpamTitan learned faster than I thought it was going to, based on other products that I've used. There was a lot more feedback. The other products are based on the users, but this one, with its AI, seems to produce tremendous improvements day-to-day. I told the teams it was going to take two to three weeks but, within a week, we had dropped the amount of spam that was getting through. By Tuesday of the following week, meaning about a week and a half after implementation, it was mature. It wasn't final—it's always going to be learning—but it was mature enough that we felt that the hand holding with the individuals and checking in were not things we needed to do anymore. Everybody was confident at that point.

Don't discount TitanHQ because you haven't heard of them. I sit with other CISOs.  We get together for dinner once a month and talk and I mentioned it but nobody had heard of them. I said, "SpamTitan has this and this feature," and I delved into some of the reasons we went with it and they were taking notes. They're excited to look at something recommended by a peer who is saying, "I've used multiple products and I like the way that these guys work. I like what they're doing and how we're stacking up our security." 

TitanHQ recently acquired Cyber Risk Aware for security awareness training with phishing simulation. I mentioned that it makes sense because you could tie that into your SpamTitan and WebTitan. Your training could be based upon real metrics, in real-time, based on what people are doing. That's a very good, competitive place to be. I look forward to their growth. When I mentioned those things my colleagues were saying, "Wow, this sounds like a company we need to really seriously take a look at."

My approach is to leverage things that make sense, not because they're there. I always look at: Why? Where are we going? How do we get there? Then we can decide whether that's the right type of product or service to use going forward. We have different outcomes than we would get if we did what most people do. They say, "Well, how do we improve what we've got?" Maybe what you have doesn't fit anymore.

We also use TitanHQ's WebTitan. We just rolled that out to replace Cisco Umbrella and because the interface is very similar to SpamTitan's interface, it was very easy to roll that forward and to manage it.

So far, SpamTitan is the easiest and most efficient solution I've used. I give it a 10 out of 10.

We are a solution provider and we have a lot of customers set up on our platform. This solution is used by us and our customers for email filtering.

The actual number of spam emails we get now is single digits per day. It's very little compared to the volume of email that we see coming into the spam tool. There are tens of thousands of emails per day, or even more. Using this tool brings it down to a manageable amount.

Overall, the intuitiveness of this product is pretty good.

Using SpamTitan reduced the load on our helpdesk. We do IT support, and we get help desk tickets coming in from people saying they've got emails caught or they're not getting emails from a certain sender. Instead of them emailing us their reports, they can easily unblock them themselves and allow them to go through. This eases our help desk ticket queue quite a lot, which takes a lot of pressure off of us.

Based on the number of tickets that we get each day that we no longer need to deal with, using SpamTitan saves us several hours per day.

The most valuable feature is the way it quarantines spam email.

The quarantine feature is easy to use. It has many different filters and you can easily find messages that our users are struggling to get delivered. It makes it easy to find out why it is that messages were blocked in the first place.

This product provides an email filtering report for our customers. A lot of users are set up with this report so that they can see the details themselves, before having to come to us.

SpamTitan has a geo-blocking feature and it reduces our spam intake.

The user interface contains quite a lot of information, so it can be a bit confusing when you first start to use it. It takes a bit of time to get used to, but once you know it, and with a bit of training, it's got everything you need. I can't really complain about it having too much information because it really helps out when you need it.

The interface looks a little dated and could be modernized.

I have been using TitanHQ SpamTitan since I joined the company, seven years ago. The company has been using it for at least ten years.

The stability is 100%. We've never had issues with stability.

This solution is very scalable and you can do so easily. For example, you can mass import email addresses so when we get new customers that want to use it, it's very quick and easy to set them up.

We currently have 5,000 users. At the moment, pretty much all of our clients are on it. If we get new customers then we will set them up and our usage will increase.

The technical support team normally gets back to us pretty quickly. However, they're a notch off of perfect. There are times when I would rate them a nine or ten out of ten. However, other times, they have taken a long time to get back to us. On these occasions, I would rate them a five or six out of ten.

Overall, I would rate support a seven out of ten.

Neutral

The initial setup was completed before I joined the company. I have set up some of our customers on the system and we've had no trouble with it along the way. 

The configuration is very easy and straightforward, and this is something that is very important to us. It saves us a lot of time and we never have to come back to reconfigure things or troubleshoot anything. It just works.

There are about ten of us on the help desk team that log in to use this product and maintain it. 

We have definitely seen a return on our investment from using this product. It's been very profitable because of how many users we have. It also saves us time because it frees the help desk staff to get other jobs done.

This pricing is absolutely fine and it's never been an issue of it being too expensive. We pass the costs along to our customers but it is competitively priced.

I have not used another similar solution. It has been in place since before I arrived and we've never had any need to use anything else.

Feature-wise, it's got everything that we need to do. There are no features that we consider missing. It gets top marks in this regard.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this product is to get familiar with it. It can be a little bit scary to start with, just because of how many features it has. I definitely suggest getting some training with it, if possible.

It's a good solution and when you leave it running, it deals with everything that you need to do. We trust it a lot. Overall, it's a good solution and there is not much that I can suggest they have to improve.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

I work for a city government, and SpamTitan provides front-end protection for any incoming email. It scans for viruses or any malware that comes across the email. I also block some countries using geoblocking features in the software. 

For example, since we don't do business with China, we block any emails coming from there because most of them try to do something malicious. 

SpamTitan has led to a tremendous reduction in spam intake. Employees will enter their email when registering for a website, which gets sold off to a million places. 

Since we implemented the solution in 2018, about 74 percent of our messages have come in clean, so 26 percent were spam or other rejected emails. That equals about 2 million clean messages and 600,000 emails that were geoblocked, flagged as spam, or otherwise rejected because of viruses or bad attachments.

SpamTitan has also improved our catch rate and reduced false positives relative to our previous solution. It's hard to say how much because I wasn't in that area of operations at the time, so I wasn't involved with our previous spam solution. 

I'm not sure if it was a configuration issue, but the catch rate was probably the opposite. In other words, three-quarters of the mail coming through was spam and only a quarter was clean. 

Implementing SpamTitan made our operations a lot more efficient because the users have accounts and can check for spam. If it's a false positive, they can release it and get the email. With the old system, they had to go to two different spam portals. It was convoluted, and I don't think too many people have used it.

It's hard for me to quantify the amount of time our employees save. I don't have those statistics. However, it saves time if your inbox isn't filled with spam. You don't need to waste time filtering through the junk. The city's communications through email have become a great deal more efficient, but I don't have statistics to back that up.

Our security has improved, as well. A virus hit the entire city government, and we believe the infection came through email. We reevaluated our products after that. We changed our antivirus and firewalls and switched our spam solution to SpamTitan. We changed almost every security product that we had to something better.

TitanSpam's security features keep malicious occurrences from coming, and the spam features prevent all the garbage from coming into our inboxes. And the geoblocking helps us automatically block email from regions we don't do business with.

The user interface is also highly user-friendly. I didn't know much about this system when we got it in 2018, but I could easily navigate it. It's intuitive and straightforward with tabs, so you can access the settings you need to get to. 

They also let you customize it to match your organization's feel, so it looks like a product from your organization. I like when companies do that. Our city logo is on it when you log in to this system. 

After we configured SpamTitan to our liking, it pretty much took care of itself. It even provides spam scores on all the emails that come in. You can determine the highest score you want to allow. 

SpamTitan's logging features could be improved. The logs are hard to deal with because you need to download the log as a text file. Then you need to search through this text file to find what you need. 

At the same time, I don't have too many problems, so I don't have to look in the logs that often. It doesn't bother me that much, but it would help if I could view these logs in a more user-friendly way.

We've been using SpamTitan since 2018.

SpamTitan is extremely stable. I've never had this system go down.

I would say that SpamTitan is highly scalable. I can see memory and CPU usage on the dashboard, and we have more than enough hardware to scale out as high as we need. I know they have packages with a lot more users than we deal with. We're running on about 500 users, but I don't think we would have a problem scaling from there. We don't have too much use for more. We only have about 900 employees here.

Many city employees don't use their official email accounts that much. For example, we have public works people out on the streets who hardly use email. My license usage went over the limit a few times, but it's not much. I think it's only 50 or 60 users.

I rate TitanHQ's support eight out of 10. They're highly knowledgeable about the product they have produced and resolve issues fairly quickly. I've had one or two issues in four years that required them to do something on their end. 

They have remote support, so they can access the private cloud. I can enable remote support, so they can connect to it, look at the issue, and resolve it remotely. It's top-notch support. We've never had a problem with them. Everything gets resolved as quickly as possible.

I never had to deal with support for GFI MailEssentials, but I know that people in those positions struggled with their support at times, so I would say SpamTitan's customer service is much better than competitors.

Positive

We were using another product called GFI MailEssentials, and the difference between SpamTitan is like night and day. We had all kinds of malware go into our inboxes, so we needed to sift through it to get to the real meat of the issue.

We function better with this product because we don't have any downtime. We haven't had any virus infections since implementing SpamTitan. We took a massive hit with GFI MailEssentials, and it took our entire network down. We had to rebuild everything manually, so we did a lot of research to find a better solution. This is what we landed on after months of research.

The deployment was relatively fast. It took a little bit of time to spin up the private cloud and around a week to deploy SpamTitan. I'd say it took about two weeks from start to finish.

The maintenance and configuration are straightforward. I configured this solution back in 2018, so it's been close to four years. I do updates and other tweaks periodically. I might change some allowlists, but it requires little involvement after the setup. It pretty much runs itself.

I worked directly with SpamTitan and implemented the solution.

We've definitely seen a return. When that security incident happened in 2017, I can't even tell you how much that cost us. There was a lot of downtime. I'm sure it was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. SpamTitan costs less than $5,000 a year. It's worth it to keep us out of those situations.

We pay around $4,200 for a license, so it doesn't come out to that much per user. It's about $8.40 per user annually. You just can't beat that. I don't know if people negotiate that down further, but TitanHQ tried to raise the price on me after we had been using this solution for a year or two. 

I told them we had already budgeted for the amount we've been paying for the past two years, so they agreed to keep the price the same. Maybe a customer could haggle for a better deal, but I think that's a pretty good price to protect one user from spam and viruses for a year.

I rate SpamTitan nine out of 10. I recommend trying it out. TitanHQ will work with you. I can't remember if I did a trial beforehand, but I know there were talks about spinning up a private cloud that we could try for 30 days. If they're willing to let you try it for a month, there's really nothing to lose. You can move on if you don't like it, and if you do, the solution's already in place, so you can start scaling it out.

In general, it's always good advice to research security products to make sure you have the best solution for your environment in place. Also, you need to make sure your products are up to date. Security updates are essential, and you should double-check your configurations. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

It's a no-brainer for me. It has 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 filtering emails, inbound and outbound, as well as have it act as a smart host for our external clients. Being an MSP, we primarily use it for filtering emails on behalf of the clients as well as filtering the content that they send and receive using the SpamTitan platform.

It is our primary filtering system. We use it to filter emails on behalf of organizations who have their own email system platforms, like Office 365. In terms of extensiveness, we use it 100%. 

We have big organizations within our country who use the SpamTitan service as their primary security system for their intelligent communication with their clients, within the country and outside the country.

It provides security for the communication between the sender and receiver. It does the encryption perfectly. We ensure that emails are sent without any security breaches. The spam catch rate at the moment is almost 100%.

The solution has helped reduce spam rates overall by 75%. It has helped us to reduce the number of attacks that we used to have. It has helped to reduce the number of complaints we've been getting from customers in terms of them receiving a lot of spam and unsolicited emails coming from the outside.

• The quarantine feature
• The reporting feature
• The content filtering feature

With the reporting feature, we were able to have broader insight on emails that our clients send as well as the emails that get to our clients. We are able to analyze when we get complaints from clients as to what happened to the emails that they sent to their clients, who sent it at what time, and the content in cases of complaints where the client did not get an email from the sender or their emails were not delivered to their sender. We are able to view at what point did the email drop, who sent the email, and to whom.

We use the geo-blocking feature based on IP addresses. We also use it based on the country and the top-level domain. We are able to block any of those three. For example, we get a lot of emails from Japan. Therefore, we have blocked the top-level domain .jp at the end.

The interface is not so user-friendly at the moment. We did attend training a few months ago on their new interface. They have a new GUI that is quite user-friendly and easy to navigate.

We would like to improve the number of quarantine reports received per day. At the moment, only one is received within 24 hours. So, there are a number of complaints that we get from customers who want to improve the reporting of the quarantined emails since they only get one copy per day. This means they may not receive other emails that have been received after they get the report. So, we would like SpamTitan to improve on the frequency of the quarantine report.

I have been using it for three years.

Stability is at 99%. We rarely have outages. We rarely contact their support team because their service is running smoothly at the moment.

The solution is scalable. If you contact them for an upgrade or add-ons on your current SpamTitan product, they are very much available to help. The service change is almost instant. Within 24 hours, you are able to upgrade from one package to another, and add-ons are done instantly.

In terms of upgrades, we are considering upgrading from our current license, which accommodates 2,000 emails. We want to upgrade to 4,000 emails. They have been very helpful on how we can implement the upgrade.

Their support is very helpful. We get the feedback that we want on time. There is a feature of their ticketing system that is perfect and easy to track the conversation as well as the history. You can download the chats that you have had with them for future reference.

I have interacted with other vendors or suppliers of almost the same feature. I can say that SpamTitan's support expertise is very good because they know what we go through and help. They have solutions at hand. If you ask them, they can help and direct you to the solution that you need. 

Positive

SpamTitan’s geo-blocking feature helps allow us to block spam emails entering our network and servers, reducing our spam intake. Our former solution was only able to handle outbound traffic. That meant that we did not have control over what was coming through our network. For example, we used to get spam emails with unknown usernames, so our customers were getting a lot more spam emails than the important emails that they should expect. 

At the time that we acquired the product, we had another product called Proxmox. As we were implementing, we tested it for about four days. After that time, we did not have any issues in terms of complaints from clients because it was smooth. While the other product was running, we brought in SpamTitan. As a strategy, from my end, it was perfectly done.

The previous solution was not user-friendly. It would only filter one way or direction. This meant we needed to buy from them twice, i.e., the same product, for inbound and outbound. Since our budget was constrained, we looked at SpamTitan, and its pricing was perfect. It was easy to deploy and user-friendly.

With the deployment of SpamTitan, we are now able to catch those unnecessary emails coming into our network, which we are able to block. There is a feature, which we have enabled, to verify the usernames that we host, meaning those that we don't host are blocked before they reach our customers or our network.

Before Proxmox and SpamTitan, we were using Barracuda Central. but acquiring the hardware as well as the renewal of Energize per year, that meant going beyond our budget. So, we approached SpamTitan. We noticed that the hardware was cost effective. We could subscribe per quarter, biannually, or annually. That flexibility meant that we had to quickly jump to SpamTitan for those advantages.

It was easy because we did the hosting for the configurations on our end with their help. It was done within a day. It took about five hours to complete the configurations, then have emails in and out through the SpamTitan product.

Within the first three years, we were able to see that this product has been perfect for our business. We have acquired more clients using this platform, unlike with our previous platform.

The collaboration between TitanHQ and us is 95% in terms of positioning us to acquire new business. Titan products manage both inbound and outbound at the lowest cost. All the requirements that we need for this solution are covered. Also, the support is perfect. We don't have any problems with it.

In the last three years, we have acquired or managed to grow the customer base on email services because we get a lot of referrals. Because we have the geo-blocking feature, which quarantines emails, it sends a report to our clients before they accept the email. This means they get to know about SpamTitan. A number of them call us about the solution before we reach out to them and sell the service.

They have different packages, services, or products that they sell. I would recommend it for small businesses to larger organizations, even enterprises, but not individuals. 

There is the flexibility to ask them what you want, then they will advise a package that suits your business.

SpamTitan's key differentiators are the pricing, system, and service that we get. They are very different from other systems that we have used or partnered with from Titan.

Before jumping into using the product, I would advise that you research other products as SpamTitan's features are mostly required for businesses at the moment.

I would rate the solution as 10 out of 10.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are SMTP controls. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It takes the load off of our server. It also takes the load off of our Internet connection, since we are not bringing in a whole bunch of spam emails unnecessarily that need to be filtered out. 

We partnered with TitanHQ SpamTitan platform so all incoming emails go through their servers first before they reach our network. It takes out, on average, 75% to 80% of the emails that would normally be received as junk. Those are filtered out and we keep what is important to us.

Over the years that we've been using it, people have gotten the confidence that the messages that they get are legitimate. Also, they glance at the stuff that ends up in their quarantine, but they don't necessarily worry about it. So, it has overall increased employee comfort and productivity.

For some of our power users, I would regularly have them sending us help desk tickets that said, "This is spam. This is spam. This is spam." That has probably been cut down by 50% 60% for those specific power users. For those who heavily rely on email, there has been probably a 50% to 60% time savings.

SpamTitan has helped improve our spam catch rate and reduce our false positive rate.

The ability for users to manage their own allow and block lists is its most valuable feature. Daily, at 3:00 AM, we have configured it so users will get a quarantine email that shows all their messages that were blocked from the day before. They can go in and release the messages themselves or they can block them if they don't ever want to see them again. They can allow them permanently, if it is a valid email that they should be receiving on a regular basis. Therefore, it really gives the end users the power to do their own thing and reduces the number of help desk tickets that my team needs to respond to.

We just implemented SpamTitan’s geo-blocking feature in the last couple of months. It has been great. We have only seen one false positive and that was a company that we partnered with in California. Their messages got blocked because their server was in Germany. Germany was one of the countries we happen to block with geo-blocking. They were like, "Oh, that is really bizarre because all of our stuff is here in California." Turns out that their hosted email that they were using was going through a failover test or something like that. So, they were rerouting their servers through Germany at that particular time. It definitely did what it was supposed to do.

We used the geo-blocking feature to restrict emails from specific destinations with a Google search. We went through some of the security forums and platforms out there and looked at the top 10 countries that cybersecurity professionals recommend blocking. We then added those to our geo-blocking list.

Primarily, we are a California-based company and don't really do business with companies outside of the United States. So, the geo-blocking feature is just an extra layer of security and extra piece of mind. Therefore, if any spam out there is trying to purport that it is coming from the United States, but really isn't, then we would not let those messages through.

Since we turned on the geo-blocking feature, we have definitely seen a reduction in spam. I don't sift through the thousands of messages a day that I see in the dashboard to see which ones were blocked by geoblocking. I am sure there are filters and things like that, but I don't necessarily get the time to deep dive into it like that. 

The user interface is really straightforward. I haven't had any issues with it whatsoever.

The overall intuitiveness is really good. We have been able to run reports, set up quarantine emails, and integrate with our Exchange server. That has all been extremely straightforward. 

The only improvement that comes to mind is updates. We are technically on TitanHQ's private cloud. We are responsible for updating our platform when a new version comes out. I would personally prefer to have SpamTitan just notify me, and say, "At this specific time on this specific day, we will be upgrading you to the newest platform."

I have been using it since October 2020.

The stability has been rock-solid. 

SpamTitan has vastly superior stability versus the previous email security solutions that we have used. Not only were we getting a lot of false positives that was really frustrating, but there was a particular day when SolarWinds was having some sort of network issue. Mail was delayed by six to eight hours coming through the network. There is just no way, as an organization, we can function like that. So, we had to get off that platform.

The scalability has been fantastic. We grow on average four to five percent year-on-year. In the two and a half years that we have been using it, we have not needed to worry about its performance.

It is being used extensively. There are several clinics that we manage who are also being filtered as well as us. I know of at least one other clinic that will be coming onboard shortly, and we will roll them into SpamTitan as well. I don't see us having any issues with having additional growth.

Whenever I have had questions and needed to reach out to support, there has always been a very quick turnaround. They have access to our dashboard so they can see what we are looking at and help guide us through where we need to go and what we need to do.

The technical support has been fantastic. Whenever we have had issues, I typically just open a support ticket. They are very responsive. Typically, within four hours, I will have an answer to my question. I would give them a solid nine out of 10. There is always room for improvement.

For our previous solution from SolarWinds, I would probably have given them about four or five out of 10. This is compared to the support that I get with TitanHQ, which is much better.

I know that they are changing their method. Instead of just by email, we now go in through an actual web portal to create a ticket. 

Positive

We have used a couple of different spam filtering systems in the past. We have an on-premise Exchange server, therefore all of our email is housed within our network. We wanted to find a robust solution that would filter spam before it reached our network.

Previously, we were using Mail Assure by SolarWinds. Prior to that, we were using a solution called Online Spam Solutions, which was just a small locally run company. The performance on Online Spam Solutions was not as good as it used to be. We were losing mail and getting a lot more false positives than we should have. Then, we did some research. We were already using SolarWinds for another product, so we decided to give them a try. Their sales pitch was vastly superior to what the actual product was. We were only with them for about two years, then we found SpamTitan and have been really happy ever since.

It was pretty straightforward. I had a little bit of an issue with the LDAP configuration, which was an issue on WebTitan as well. It was more important for us to have it working for SpamTitan. Working with support, the issue was pretty straightforward and we got it ironed out in a matter of days. From initially creating the platform to where we had it fully configured, it took about two weeks.

Email is so mission-critical. We did not want to have any downtime or a period where we were really going through a lot of fine-tuning. One of the nice things about SpamTitan was the default settings that came with the platform were very good. It was already doing a better job than what we came from. So, the fine tuning period was a lot shorter than I anticipated it was going to be based on previous solutions.

We had TitanHQ help us with anything that we needed.

It is very good. We actually ended up saving money from our previous solution.

We did evaluate some other companies. I participate in an organization called Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society (HIMSS). I reached out to some of my peers there and asked them what they were using. Quite a few of them came back and said that they were using SpamTitan from TitanHQ. So, we gave them a full evaluation and decided to use them.

Definitely go for it. It will make your end users feel a lot happier because they can manage their own quarantines, allow lists, and block lists. At the same time, knowing that you have your own private cloud that you can manage yourself makes it a great solution for those who want to have full administrative access to their own system.

I would give the solution a solid nine out of 10. I would almost give it a 10. Frankly, it has been an extremely good solution for us as an organization. However, I am not normally one to give a score of 10. There is always some sort of room for improvement, but this solution is a high nine in my opinion.