TitanHQ SpamTitan Reviews

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

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

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

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

Its spam protection is excellent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The deployment took maybe three hours.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Positive

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 sell communications solutions to companies like Microsoft, Cisco, 8x8, and RingCentral. We mainly use SpamTitan for basic email filtering. We don't use geoblocking because most of our client companies' employees work remotely, so we're working with users in India, Bulgaria, the United States, and multiple destinations in Europe. We might configure it one day, but not now.

Each employee gets a report every morning, and we authorize them to release the emails they want from quarantine. It's their responsibility. We are all working remotely, so our antivirus and other security solutions don't work well unless everyone is connected to a VPN. We are seeking a cloud solution for that. 

In the meantime, SpamTitan is much better for our users. They can check their spam reports and see whether those emails are really spam or not.

In the past, our users opened a lot of support tickets because they didn't get an email they were expecting and they couldn't find it in quarantine. We had some problems with our previous solution. It's much easier to track emails in SpamTitan and find them. 

Our previous solution's configuration was complex, which made it harder to provide support for our users. You had to go through three or four tabs to find the email you were looking for. SpamTitan has one tab where you search all the reports and emails. It's easier to manage when someone complains they didn't get an email because it has some kind of attachment. 

We haven't had many issues with false positives since we optimized SpamTitan's configuration. We only had one false positive, but it has worked perfectly otherwise. There was a noticeable improvement in spam in the first week. After four or five days, it was obviously much better than before. We didn't get the complaints we were getting every day.

I had some ad emails getting through the filter from time to time. I don't get them anymore with SpamTitan. It's always moved to the junk by default. SpamTitan has some intelligent features for learning which emails should go to the inbox and which should be flagged or quarantined. 

URL blocking is helpful. It will block any URL sending out lots of spam or phishing. It will rename the URL itself and send it to the user. The admin will block it, or you can allow users to release it if you want. 

SpamTitan doesn't allow you to customize the frequency of reports. Sometimes our users complain that they cannot control how often SpamTitan's report comes. Users get a daily report, but some would prefer a notification every time an email is quarantined. 

Our previous solution sent out immediate alerts when an email was quarantined. Some people prefer it, but it doesn't matter to me. I get the report when I start my day, and that's fine. 

We've been using SpamTitan for around four months. 

I rate TitanHQ's customer service 10 out of 10. I've contacted them twice in the past few months. They were highly responsive and resolved issues quickly. I don't think there was much difference between TitanHQ's support and the service we got from Barracuda's team. 

The main difference was the solution. Even if I got the support quickly from Barracuda, the configuration or the setup was hard to follow compared to SpamTitan.

Positive

We were using Barracuda when we decided to move to SpamTitan. At the time, we were looking for the best value. It was also essential for us to have an email filtration setup that allows users to log in and see which emails were in quarantine.

The most critical factor was cost-effectiveness. SpamTitan was much cheaper than Barracuda and offered the same value. When we did a trial, we also found the console was faster than Barracuda. The console is easier to use, and the configuration wasn't complicated.

I don't have any complaints about Barracuda's ability to catch spam. It catches, but it's more complicated to categorize where it goes. SpamTitan is more straightforward. SpamTitan has URL blocking, too. I feel it's different there. 

It took us about 20 minutes to set SpamTitan up. We updated the DNS records and added a configuration to SpamTitan. That was it. The speed of the installation was crucial because we set it up on a workday. We monitored it for the next 24 hours and had no issues.

Our COO did a search on the internet. We looked at multiple options but only tried SpamTitan. We found that it was the most suitable.

I rate SpamTitan 10 out of 10. 

It is used for any filtering pertaining to email: viral filtering, scam filtering, and spam filtering. We have implemented it in all our existing customers until now.

We implemented it at one of our largest customers, specifically to knock out viral intrusions on Microsoft 365 platform. It virtually eliminated them, which saves them money because we are not continually battling viral outbreaks for them.

Because of the random nature of attacks, we could have gotten three attacks in a month, but SpamTitan has taken that to zero. We could have gotten one attack in six months, but SpamTitan has taken that to zero. It is difficult to quantify that. By far, it is far more costly to battle a viral outbreak than it is to pay for SpamTitan.

It is a very easy product to use. There is one interface that services all our clients' health. Once learning the interface, we don't have to learn another one for each client. It is the same interface, which is valuable. Therefore, we find the single interface the most valuable since I have a very small team. I don't have one or two people dedicated to just SpamTitan. We all need to learn the interface and be fluent in it. So, having a unified single interface is a big deal for us. I don't have to teach my people five different interfaces in order to be managing a product. They use one interface for all our clients. It is a single pane of glass, which is huge for us.

The geo-blocking feature has reduced the amount of viral intrusions from foreign countries, especially recently. We saw an uptick in attempted viral intrusions in SpamTitan right after Ukraine was invaded. Most intrusions were coming from Russian pilot countries. The geo-blocking feature stopped a lot of that.

The geo-blocking feature is very easy to use. We pretty much set the filter up, then blocked a set number of countries. If another country comes through, and we see garbage coming from it, then it is very easy to block. If we have specific sites where we have to allow site X through from that country, that is also very easy to do.

We had problems initially when first implementing eFaxing. We had problems trying to get eFaxes to be recorded correctly and come through correctly. That was resolved fairly quickly. However, if you are heavy users of E-fax, I would suggest that you test your eFax before implementing so you can have that ironed out before going live.

We had to do some stuff with eFax in order to get eFaxing to come through. Had we known that ahead of time, we could have had that ironed out before we went live. However, we just didn't realize it was going to interfere with it. After we implemented it, we realized it was interfering with some of our eFaxes, so we had to go figure out why. SpamTitan's tech support was very good. They helped us figure it out. We got it implemented pretty quick and fixed pretty quick. But, in hindsight, that would probably be the one thing where I would say, "Go check your eFaxes. Make sure that they all work."

When we first implement SpamTitan, there is a report that gets sent to the end users on a periodic basis. Basically, the email comes with three links on it, and it says, "If you don't want to receive this, click on this link. If you want to receive this once, click on this one. If you want it to continue to come through, click on this one." It's a pretty straightforward, well-written email. However, we get customers who, for some reason, don't understand it. I am not really sure why. I think it is pretty clear and easy to understand. If there is anything that could be improved, it would be that process. I am not really sure what you could do to improve the process since my tech support guys, who work with us are saying, "Why don't people understand this email?" I am like, "I really don't know." We don't see why they don't understand it. It is not everybody either, so it is not like everybody doesn't understand it. There are just a handful of people who are like, "I don't understand it." It is like, "How can you not understand that? It's pretty well-written."

I have been using the solution since July or August last year.

It has been very stable. We have had no instability problems with it at all. It has been pretty much 100% uptime.

It is pretty scalable. In less than a day, we just went from one customer on it with 700 users up to about 2,000 users with no performance issues.

There is a lot of stuff on the user interface, but it is very easy to use. It's very well-organized and easy to find what you are looking for. When we can't find what we are looking for, which happened a couple weeks ago when I was looking for a particular feature and couldn't seem to locate it, their tech support is phenomenal. They usually get right back to you. 

The technical support is excellent. We have used them several times. We have had a couple of incidents with eFaxes where we were having problems getting eFaxes to come through correctly. They were able to not only help us determine why they weren't coming through correctly, but help us resolve the problem pretty quickly.

We have worked with competing solutions. I think their tech support is over and above their competitors. Their tech support comes back to us very quickly. They very easily understand the problem and their solutions are usually dead on.

I would rate their technical support as 10 out of 10.

Positive

We went with SpamTitan mainly because of cost.

The implementation was very easy. It took us less than two hours to do our initial implementation. We recently implemented 15 more customers on it, and one of my tech support guys did it in less than a day.

The geo-blocking feature took us a little bit of time to implement, as we tried to figure out which countries to block. 

It has a fair, reasonable profit margin. 

SpamTitan has helped improve our spam catch rate and reduce our false positive rate by at least 70%. If we are tracking viral intrusions, it is even more than that. It has virtually eliminated viral intrusions.

Everything has really been great with the pricing and licensing. In fact, we just implemented ArcTitan because everything was going so well with SpamTitan.

We evaluated other solutions. We really didn't implement them anywhere because they either didn't seem to do enough or didn't have a decent profit margin. They just weren't really worth our while. There was another solution that did everything SpamTitan does. It does a great job, but it was just far too costly.

It is a very good product. I am very happy with it.

There are five of us working with SpamTitan, and we all wear multiple hats. I am the president of the company, but I also do tech support. I have tech support guys and that is all they do. We all wear the same hats. That is why it is important to have that single interface that is very fluid and easy to use. That way, all of my people can learn it very quickly and easily. So, we can manage it without a big learning curve.

SpamTitan has other suites. They have WebTitan and ArcTitan. We have recently purchased ArcTitan and are using it. We will also probably be moving into WebTitan.

I would rate it as 10 out of 10. It is a great product.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have been using it for about six months.

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

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

We are monitoring around 20 mailboxes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

It's used for protection and to improve our security. We have different layers of protection and this is one of them. SpamTitan's cloud is the first point where our emails are filtered and then they are delivered to us. Before everything is delivered to our Exchange Server it goes through the filter. 

In the past, spam emails were hammering our Exchange Server constantly. But now, it's going to the private cloud first and everything is filtered. The only things that are delivered are what should be delivered. All the spam is stopped on the private cloud. Our Exchange Server is not busy anymore.

In addition, in the SpamTitan portal, we can also quickly identify the status of emails, if anyone has missed an email. We can see exactly what is in quarantine and we can check that easily.

And because users can release false positives themselves, we in IT don't have to be busy doing so all the time. Users are not spammed with 20 emails. Instead, they get one email saying, "Hey, you have 20 emails which SpamTitan thinks are spam." The user can choose to tell the system, "This is not spam, it is a valid email." That has also helped save employees' time by not having to sort through junk emails.

There are certain categories of emails that are blocked and end-users don't even see them. That depends on the rating.

When we had different solutions, like McAfee® Security for Microsoft Exchange (MSME), IT had a lot of system administration work. We had to do a lot of updates. Now, because SpamTitan is a cloud solution, we don't need to worry about that. It cuts our system administration time.

Another benefit, of course, is the protection from emails that can damage your organization. We had a case before we had SpamTitan, where somebody clicked on an email and as a result, all our files were blocked and the attackers were asking us for money. Because we have good backups, we just restored from the backups and it was okay. But since deploying SpamTitan, we haven't had that issue anymore.

SpamTitan has two main features included in it. One is like ClamAV and the other is like Bitdefender. It scans for viruses. There is also content filtering and many other options. For example, you can set up filter rules, you can block email addresses and domains, and you can do pattern filtering.

These days there are a lot of emails with macros and that's a really dangerous situation. A lot of schools are being attacked. We have set it up so that anything that comes with a macro goes into quarantine first. We then get an email notification that there is a macro and we check it. Sometimes it's a false positive, but this way we can control what is released and what is not. You never know what a document with a macro can deliver. It can infect your whole environment.

We have a dashboard where we can see how many emails are legitimate and how many are spam. When people come to us and say, "Hey, we got some spam," we can say, "Look at THE dashboard. Something like 70 percent of the emails coming in are spam, so be happy it blocks all of that email."

And, we moved to something even better than that because we're now using SpamTitan Plus. It has an extra feature so that if you receive an email with a link, it goes to the TitanHQ server and that link is also checked. That is probably the best feature. It is good for security because lots of spam happens via the links that people click, or through emails with viruses and macros.

SpamTitan is also easy to use. You just set it up and everything works the way it should. The user interface is easy to use and navigate. We can quickly do system updates ourselves because we have a private cloud with access to our own server.

The way it rates what is spam and what is not spam can be improved, although that is true with every system.

I have been using TitanHQ SpamTitan for four years.

I don't have any recollection of it being unstable.

Because it's in the cloud, you can request a memory or CPU increase, if needed. From their side, it's just a matter of pressing a button because it's all virtual. So scalability is not an issue. 

And to move to SpamTitan Plus, we only needed one update and it was done.

Their technical support is fine. We have had a few calls and issues were resolved, sometimes on the same day, sometimes the next day.

I called their helpdesk and I said we wanted to increase the memory and they increased it. The memory was okay, but there is a lot of checking with the ClamAV or BitDefender and the service panel stopped and was disabled. They increased the memory and, since then, we haven't had that problem again.

I don't have any complaints about their speed of response. There's a portal that you call and, within a few hours, somebody responds. Compared to other cloud services, their support is quite good, but it's very difficult to compare. It's like apples and oranges.

Technical support was a very important point when we were considering a solution. If there are any issues and an email doesn't come in, I have a problem.  Email is a primary process and it needs to work.

Positive

We had a different system before, McAfee Security for Microsoft Exchange, but it didn't work well. Every update was a disaster. There was a lot of administrative work and it was not efficient. You can't compare it with SpamTitan.

We also used a McAfee Appliance and Barracuda in the past. When we heard about TitanHQ we requested a month or two-month trial to see how it works.

Because we have a private cloud and our own server, setting it up was easy. They did it for us, but there were some settings that needed fine-tuning because SpamTitan needs to learn what is considered spam in your organization. There was an issue at first but they solved the problem and after the first month it was okay.

Technically, the setup was not a problem for us. When deciding on a product we needed to balance the setup and the features. We tested it, no strings attached and, in that trial period, we did all the fine-tuning. When we were happy with it, we started a subscription.

In the beginning, when we set it up, we needed a little bit of time to get to know the system and to find things. But after about a month or two, we had overcome all those issues. We were able to find the features we needed, like SPF reject on failure, for example. We did that ourselves.

We set everything up with the help of their engineers and we are very happy with it.

I'm very business-minded. I negotiated with them because we are in education. I told him that we cannot pay high prices. They were quite good with the EDU pricing and we are quite happy with it.

They have to strike a balance. A product can be very good, but if you can't afford it... 

In this case, the product is good, and they were also sensitive to our situation in education, where we don't have a lot of money. We have to be very careful how we spend it and where we invest it.

We also have endpoint protection, in case something gets through the first layer. For that, we have McAfee Endpoint Protection for the computers. But SpamTitan is our first layer of protection.

In terms of our spam catch rate, one month is different from the next month. It depends on the spammers because they change their strategies, but SpamTitan can stop all of it.