TitanHQ SpamTitan Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

Their pricing is really good for what it does.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The most valuable features are the 

• reporting
• overall filtering functionality

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

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

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

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

I have been using TitanHQ SpamTitan for two years.

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

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

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

We haven't really engaged their technical support.

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are just using it for spam filtering at this point. We are open to future options, but right now, this is our biggest problem. This solution really helps mitigate the spam for us.

We have a MX record that points to them before it gets to us for emails.

We were getting hit left and right with a bunch of different spam, spoofing, etc. When we deployed SpamTitan, that immediately stopped. Of course, there were some false positives. However, I have been going through regularly, and now there have been less as we identify some that should be valid but were blocked. Once in a while, we will still get some that get let through, but we are able to update them quickly through the web interface. Therefore, it has been working really well for us. It is helping us a lot.

In the first few weeks, there were a lot more false positives that I would go through and release, then update the filter. As each week went by, it got better and better. Now, it is just here and there. There are a few, but most of them are right on. So, it has been doing really well.

In November and December, we saw a bunch of people get a phishing attack. They clicked on the link, then their computer got infected. We had to go wipe their computer and open a bunch of issues, about 10 to 12 a month from November to December. When we implemented SpamTitan, it went down to zero. It was more the false positives rather than people falling for phishing scams. It was huge as far as the difference.

We only receive emails from internal clients. Most of the stuff on the block list is from the UK and Germany. That stuff is getting blocked.

The user interface has been really good. There is an option to send people an email with what has been filtered on your stuff. Given everything else that our users do, I thought, "Let me just hold onto those keys right now, and I'll just review," because we only have 200-and-something users. So, I have been just filtering it for them. Some people report, "Hey, this guy sent me an email. I haven't heard back." I immediately go and find it, then release it. That has been working well for us.

The solution works really well. For a small nonprofit like us who don't have a large server footprint and rely heavily on cloud services, this is great for all our emails and the mobile workforce that we have. This is a great way to manage the traffic, hopefully keep our people from getting the phishing emails and stuff like that, helping to mitigate the risks.

I wish there would be less false positives. 

We have been using the solution since late November or early December 2021.

It is incredibly reliable. It has been like a rock, but it has only been a few months. It hasn't gone down or anything.

As far as scalability, it is cloud-based. It just searches all the mailboxes for the domain name. I don't have to add or reduce email boxes. It is already set up. It is really hands-off. As we grow, if you can add domains, then you just add the domains. It is really easy to grow with it. We haven't had any capacity issues.

We used the technical support once. Back in December, we used it because I had forgotten to add one of our domains, but that was really quick and easy.

We didn't use a solution like this previously.

We looked into this type of solution because of the number of people who were falling for phishing emails. I provided training to help educate them, but they were still clicking on stuff that they shouldn't have. Also, we had too many instances of having to reset laptops.

It was super easy to set up, configure, and use. They walked us through all the steps for updating our MX records, SPF records, and all the DNS stuff. 

The quick setup time was an important factor when we chose the solution because things were super busy. All the different infections were really hindering our department. So, it was huge to be able to deploy this solution so quickly with them kind of holding your hand through it. That was huge.

They walk you through every little detail, which is really helpful.

I signed up. In the first week, when we got the records, we had to wait until they were updated, then we did all the steps following their guidelines. You do one step, then you wait a week for everything to update. Then, you do the next step and start going through the false positives. So, it didn't take that long at all. It was according to their timeline. They said, "You need to wait for this to update before you do the next step." I said, "Okay," and we did just that. It worked out really well.

When someone's laptop is infected, our policy is to go and reset it to factory default. This is a huge burden on them. They have to reset all their passwords, and it is just a big problem. Therefore, it has been a huge time factor savings for our employees.

The price was great compared to other solutions that we looked at the time.

There is no appliance required for your onsite data center because it is all cloud-based. 

I evaluated several solutions over the last six months leading up to actually implementing this solution. We evaluated costs because we are very budget-sensitive. SpamTitan was our premier pick, but the cost was still too much. Then, finally in December, they just said, "We have a deal for this month only." They gave us a really good price. So, I said, "I'll go for it," because that was the one hurdle that I was facing: the cost. They just totally slashed it, and I jumped on.

It is easy to deploy, learn, and administer.

The solution is meeting all our needs right now. We don't have any big requirements though. I think it is doing a really good job.

I would rate the solution as nine out of 10. 

We use it to scan for malicious software and other threats.

The solution is in the cloud. Our emails are directed to servers that clean them by scanning for spam, viruses, et cetera. The emails are then forwarded to our email server, which we have on-premises.

What I like about SpamTitan is that it takes the stress away from us as users. We do not worry about our email. We have not had any major email threats since we have been using SpamTitan.

The solution has also helped improve our spam catch rate. Prior to SpamTitan, we were using an alternate solution that was on-premises, but we still had about 60 percent of positive, threatening emails coming through. Since we moved to SpamTitan, that figure is down to about 10 percent. That is a drastic improvement.

Another benefit is that it saves our employees time by not having to sort through junk and spam emails, because any email that is suspicious is not allowed into our environment. It's kept there on their servers. We then receive an email saying, "These are the threats that we have noticed for the day. You can go in and check through those threats and see what you think is suspicious. Once you do that, you can release that email. To me, that is a plus.

The challenge with emails is that they are one of the vulnerable aspects of any network, given that a user—one of the biggest threats to network security—can compromise all of your security because they click a link in an email. Even though our organization is small, and the number of accounts that we protect with SpamTitan is small, the value that it offers is very great.

I like the fact that we can review any email that the solution deems to be a threat, before it gets into our environment. It could be a valid email, but if at any point that email appears to be a threat, it is held and we can check it out, see if it's a legitimate email, and then release it.

Also, the user interface, in terms of usability, is rather straightforward. It's very user-friendly and easy to navigate. Any basic user who has never traversed the SpamTitan interface can understand it. We have never had any complaints from new users about difficulties in working with emails that are held.

Another feature of SpamTitan that I like is the reporting. We are able to identify the users or accounts that have been attacked most. We can see information that shows us the sites that the user goes to, and that helps in launching an investigation of that user and how they use our resources. That's a very good capability for us. If somebody has been using a machine as a bot to launch or carry malicious activities, we have been able to detect that. We have been able to prevent a couple of cases of ransomware attacks thanks to SpamTitan.

What would be helpful to me is an alert if there were an increase in the number of threats that have been picked up. In that case, an alert could be sent to the admin in our company, to inform us. It could say something like, "Generally, about 20 percent of your incoming emails have been threats. Now it has jumped up to 30 or 40 percent." Something like that would be beneficial. That way, we could check to see if it's a result of something inside our company. We could be a bit more preventative, more proactive. That would help me greatly as a network administrator.

I've been using TitanHQ SpamTitan for approximately five years.

It's difficult to give any solution a 100 percent positive rating, but thus far we have had no setbacks at all with SpamTitan. Everything that they offered has been done. They continue to do so, and have done so from the time we initiated the deployment until today.

The solution grows with our needs. We have not had any drawbacks as our requirements have grown. SpamTitan is a solution that you set up and forget, because it works that well. Even when your needs grow, it grows with you without you knowing that anything is being added to the solution. We have never had an issue with SpamTitan when it comes to scalability.

Our environment is not that big. We have about 400 to 500 email accounts, and a similar number of employees.

This year though, we plan to sit down and look at other solutions they have that may be beneficial to us.

Because it works that well, we rarely have to speak to anyone for technical assistance. The technical support for the initial setup was excellent. The customer service was excellent. During the setup, the support person was very accommodating and flexible. 

The few times that we have spoken to anyone, they were also very accommodating.

Another thing I like about SpamTitan is that they keep you abreast of the new technologies they offer, if there are any changes to your current solution, or if they're doing anything that would improve the solution. That's the most that you can ask for.

If I look at the solution that we had prior, there's no comparison between it and TitanHQ when it comes to support. With the previous solution, it would take days, sometimes, to get a response from the technical support. And with respect to other online solutions we have, there is still no comparison. TitanHQ support  is very receptive, very responsive, and very knowledgeable.

Positive

We were using Websense Content Gateway, and one of the major reasons we switched was the support. The cost was also a factor. SpamTitan gives you a lot for what you pay. You get more value on the dollar.

I did the setup and it was seamless. The only thing I had to do was diversion of the MX information for our email exchange. Everything was done within less than 15 minutes. And the propagation of the information to the DNS service took about a couple of hours.

We have seen a lot of ROI. The fact that we are working today in an environment that is full of threats, and we are still operating without any major issues, is a testament to the return on our investment. We had a lot of hits before SpamTitan, and that was one of the things that led us to seek an alternate solution to spam, malicious software, and other threats. We looked for something that was more practical and more effective, and that led us to SpamTitan.

The price is good by today's standards. You actually get what you pay for. 

The licensing agreement is rather seamless. You pay for a period and once that is up, you just renew. They give you some leeway in the payments. It's not like it's going to expire today and they're going to bombard you today saying, "Look, your contract has expired. We're going to cancel." That's a good thing as well.

We went back to Websense to evaluate them and we looked at a solution from Barracuda. For what we wanted, and the seamless nature of the operation, from our initial investigations, SpamTitan seemed to be the best. They seemed to be the best in terms of usability, scalability, and operational ability.

I would recommend SpamTitan, but it should not be the only solution you look at. You should do your own investigation. But if you do not want to do that investigation and just want a recommendation for a product, I would highly recommend SpamTitan.

We use SpamTitan as our preliminary filter for all inbound emails.

After implementing SpamTitan, we're less bothered by irrelevant spam messages and less concerned about viruses and macro-enabled files getting through because the rules are configured to stop them. It eases security headaches while improving the user experience because there's less spam. SpamTitan also reduces the administrative and security burden because it deals with threats before they can even get into our network. 

About 37 percent of our inbound email is clean, and SpamTitan blocks the remaining 63 percent. That gives some idea of how much junk it cuts out. The solution has improved our spam catch rate while reducing false positives. It has saved us substantial time and hassles sifting through that. 

I joined this company five years ago, and SpamTitan was one of the first solutions I installed. Inbound spam dropped by 95 percent. Some still get through, obviously. You have to draw a fine line because you don't want to block valid emails. Instead of locking it all the way down, we lock it down as much as possible. In the end, people have to put up with a few spam emails rather than missing valid emails that might have been blocked.

The user interface is intuitive and straightforward. All the functions are self-evident from the titles on the menus. They're crystal clear, and the in-application help is handy.

Specifying your own filtering rules can be somewhat tricky. You can leave it alone or add your own filter rules using regular expressions. It would be nice to get a little more help configuring the regular expressions. That is quite complicated, and it's something I struggled with. 

I've been using SpamTitan for about seven or eight years.

Stability has never been an issue. I've been using it for seven years in total. I've only had one problem, and that was my fault for not following the correct procedures during a system update. I opened a ticket with TitanHQ support, and they fixed it in about 30 minutes.

SpamTitan is highly scalable. You can add as many clustered servers as you require. If you find that your cluster is under a heavy load, it's simple to get SpamTitan to add other clusters to your environment. If we doubled in staff, our current solution has more than enough capacity to cope, but we're not planning on changing our usage at this time.  

We have roughly 250 users, including everybody from the CEO to warehouse workers. They don't use the program directly, but they benefit from having their email filtered. 

TitanHQ support is absolutely brilliant, a perfect 10 out of 10. In addition to SpamTitan, we also use WebTitan, their cloud-based web filtering solution. I've had to contact support maybe two or three times in the past five years. On each occasion, communication and rectification of the issue have been outstanding. They're on it.

Positive

I have used other products, but it's been a while. We previously used Mimecast, and it was also an excellent solution but considerably more expensive. Both solutions are stable and have great support. 

Setting up SpamTitan is effortless. We got TitanHQ to set up a private cloud for us. Once the server was live, it was just a matter of reconfiguring my DNS MX records to route all inbound emails through SpamTitan. After that, I configured SpamTitan to route inbound emails to our Office 365 environment. It literally took me 20 minutes to get it running.

We had zero problems setting up and configuring SpamTitan. We didn't need to contact support. It runs out of the box. You only need to do some configuration to customize it for your use case. Total deployment time was about three to four weeks from the initial purchase order to going live. 

After the setup, one person is more than enough to maintain SpamTitan. We don't have a dedicated person for the solution because it needs little input. Once it's set up, it just runs. It's a fantastic product.

I did the installation myself because I've used it before. We purchased it directly through TitanHQ. The initial setup was perfectly straightforward, and I did the fine tweaking myself over a period of time.

We've seen a 95 percent reduction in inbound spam and an equivalent reduction in inbound, malicious, phishing emails, and virus emails. You can't get a better return on investment than improving your security.

I rate SpamTitan 10 out of 10. It's a great option if you are looking for an efficient, reliable, easy-to-use email filtering solution that doesn't require onsite IT people to maintain. You don't need a technical understanding of email protocols and security to use it.

My advice is to look at the pros and cons of all the email filtering solutions and pick one that best fits your budget and security requirements. I can't say that SpamTitan is the right solution for everybody, but it's certainly perfect for us. I'm extremely happy with it and have been for years. It does what it says on the tin. SpamTitan is reasonably priced, and TitanHQ 's tech support is excellent. I can't speak highly enough of those guys.

It feels like we have a little bit more control with SpamTitan than we had with our previous solution. We have a little bit more insight as to exactly what's going on in the cloud. We get full logging of those mail servers. It's been great.

In addition, the solution's integration with IMAP was a big reason we went with it. While it didn't really improve our organization, it mitigated a ton of setup work we would have had to do if we had had to go with something else.

And the reporting is something that has made our business run more efficiently.

Our false positives have gone up, but what we have found is that people actually really like seeing a lot of emails denied and then being able to allow them, as needed. That's been great. It gives them more control over what's coming in.

There are two things I find extremely valuable. They are among the most important things for ongoing administration purposes.

The first is that the product offers both inbound and outbound spam filtering and it enables amazing reporting. It's very specific and very easy to track down.

For example, if somebody calls us and says, "Hey, I'm having a problem not getting an email," or, "I'm having a problem sending an email," or, "I sent an email and it's not showing up," the discovery work to resolve those kinds of things has gotten so much easier because we can see what's going on right at the edge of our incoming and our outgoing email. A regular tech support dude can log in and type in very little information about what the customer is calling about, and get a very practical view of what is going on from address to address or regarding a subject line. They can filter on all sorts of different things.

That's probably the most important feature because we do get a lot of people who question our mail service. Now, unlike before, those requests don't come to me. They're very easy for our tech support department to look into and give the customer an answer right then and there.

The second valuable feature is built-in rate limiting. I haven't played with it yet because we have our own rate-limiting solution built into our mail solution on site. But when that needs an update or when that stops working, you better believe that's going to be something I'm going to lean on in the cloud because it's already there. It's already set up. I will just have to type in what we want it to do. That is a value-add. And my boss, the CTO, spoke up and was excited about that as well.

The admin user interface is very granular. Anyone who is in IT can relate to the statement: "With anything granular, there is going to be a little bit of complexity." It can be difficult, on a layer-by-layer basis, to wrap your head around it.

Because the administration interface is so granular, some of the categories and some of the settings end up in really odd places. It's hard to figure out where a certain setting is sometimes. I brought up the issue to our sales guy and, from what I understand, they're working on that.

But it's also something I can appreciate because it gives me the flexibility to delegate control to anyone in our organization, whether it be us, as the global administrator, or our tech support people and I only want to give them access to certain domains. I can also give control to a customer who registered a domain through us and who wants to manage their own domain. I wouldn't say it's super-intuitive, but it is granular.

Also, a little bit more email that is categorized as "clean" is coming through nowadays. But with that said, it's doing a great job at blocking a lot of the more obvious, blatant spam—the newsletters and the marketing stuff that you can usually unsubscribe from. Those are the types of emails that 90 percent of people don't want. But compared to our last spam filter, it does let a little bit more email through that is categorized as "clean."

We've been using TitanHQ SpamTitan for just over one year. Just a few weeks ago we got our one-year renewal.

It's been extremely stable. Everything that it uses has worked. It has built-in error alerting and that has worked. That has told us about what's not working or what's filling up. We're happy with it.

From one to 10, where 10 is "most important" in terms of our requirements for this kind of solution, stability is a 10. That's our number-one priority. We have about 18,000 users in total, and if the solution goes down we start getting a lot of calls.

From my understanding, the solution is in AWS and TitanHQ can very quickly stand up extra virtual machines and add them to the cluster. The scalability is infinite. I have zero worries about scaling.

They have amazing tech support. They went above and beyond. During setup, they gave us templates for our end-user customers that we could put our name on. They trained our tech support guys. They also reach out once in a while and say, "Hey, it looks like you have an update available for your server. Do you want us to do that, or do you want to do that?" They're very nice. They're not too pushy or annoying. They actually add value, which is a breath of fresh air.

I wish everyone would care and respond the way these guys do. I can't think of another example of where I have been impressed by a vendor's tech support. I have very low expectations when it comes to tech support, typically. They generally do not add any value. I usually feel that I need to pick up that slack and be that person. It's been great that I can actually throw a question out to them and get an answer in layman's terms; something that I understand. They will go above and beyond and actually offer a little bit extra when they reply. That's nice because I don't know their product. They're trying to teach me a little bit more about it so we can both win.

Positive

We started with a product called Roaring Penguin. We ended up getting forced out of that solution due to some company buyouts. They were purchased by AppRiver. The thing that was unique about Roaring Penguin was a very unique way of authenticating our users, which we wanted to keep consistent.

We wanted to keep our infrastructure intact and not have to build anything new. A lot of the new spam filters required some sort of LDAP authentication and we were using IMAP authentication. It was great when we found out that not only was SpamTitan less expensive than a lot of the other solutions, but it was very granular and allowed us to do things that we had been doing already with our previous spam filter.

In terms of the stability of SpamTitan versus Roaring Penguin, they are both very good.

I've been dealing with email since I was a teenager, so for me the setup process was really intuitive. Email, for the most part, is black and white they allowed me to set this up in phases and to test it in phases. I had all the confidence in the world, when we were ready to cut over to it, that it was going to at least flow and that everything was going to work correctly. Everything was tested and from there it was just a matter of tweaking things. I didn't need help to set it up, so overall, I thought it was intuitive.

When setting it up, we had a rocky start with just a little bit more spam coming through than we previously had. That was expected to a certain degree because we didn't move a lot of our rules over to it. Our users had done custom whitelisting and we had no practical way of moving that over.

SpamTitan tech support did a great job at giving us a generalized solution for that, which people actually preferred. It was more of a, "We'll catch everything and you guys let through what you want" approach. That has done just an outstanding job. We've been hands-off since the first couple of months and it's been great.

The prep work for the solution took about a week. After that, it took about another two weeks. Week two was cut-over and dealing with some of the extra spam that we were getting. In week three, I focused on outgoing spam filtering, and that also took a little bit of support.

In terms of maintenance of the solution, most requests get funneled my way. There have been things delegated to our tech support department. They have been given training directly by SpamTitan, which I thought was really cool. The training was also recorded and we let our new hires watch that training. There aren't a lot of escalations that come my way. I don't even hear about 95-plus percent of the tickets because they're able to whitelist or blacklist something on behalf of a user very quickly. Beyond that, I get involved with things like a spam campaign. I track down where it's coming from and how best to block it.

We evaluated AppRiver and SolarWinds' Spam Experts. We went with SpamTitan because it was the only one with IMAP authentication. But it was not only that. They had a name out there and good reviews. I felt good about using them.

My only advice is that if you're forwarding email to external addresses, and also make use of the outgoing email filter, you may want to test that scenario.

We use it for domain spam filtering. You put the original MX records on their server and the mail goes to them and then back to you, clean.

One way that TitanHQ positions me, as a reseller, to acquire new business is that what they have is comprehensive. It's not any one thing that does it. It's a conglomeration of product offerings. The group of products that we can offer makes us look better because we're offering a comprehensive suite of solutions.

Every client that uses it experiences a productivity boost. If somebody has to filter through 150 or 200 emails a day to find the 30 good ones, that's inefficient. If they're using SpamTitan it's making them more efficient because they don't have to go through all the junk.

SpamTitan helps improve your spam catch-rate and reduce your false-positive rate. It depends on the domain, but in general it blocks spam email which amounts to about 60-plus percent of the email that people receive. It makes them that much more efficient.

The user interface and user experience of SpamTitan are very good. It's easy to use and very intuitive. No end-user is going to buy the product. A company or a reseller is going to buy it for them. As one of those resellers, I know that our users get a daily report and they can un-quarantine something, or block it in the future.

They could improve on the color of the interface.

I've been using TitanHQ SpamTitan for four or five years.

I pay them a flat price for space on a shared server and I can then set up unlimited domains and up to 200 email addresses.

The stability is extremely high.

It's an all-in solution. We have it across five domains and there are about 175 users.

The biggest benefit of being a partner of TitanHQ is the technical support. It's good, quality support. Any product can say it is as good as it wants, but without support, no product is useful.

Their support is well above average. They are way better than the average tech support you get from other companies.

Positive

I used to use a different product and I was pretty happy with it, but then it had a technology fallout and it disappeared off the planet. We couldn't get to our system. Their phones were out for a month and the service was down for a month and we just had to get away from them.

I had Googled SpamTitan, from the TitanHQ line of products, and had gotten very good feedback about them. I decided to give them a try because I needed a new solution. The service worked and the tech support is great.

The setup is another area where we go back to the support they provide. Their support department holds your hand and helps you get through the process. I did four or five domains over a couple of hours on a weekend.

It's pretty simple, just a matter of making sure you have control of the DNS and updating the MX records.

It just takes one person for deployment and maintenance.

The biggest lesson I've learned from using the solution is that there are a lot of nasty emails out there.