TitanHQ SpamTitan Reviews

We primarily use the solution for spam filtering for all of our internal clients.

We're talking ten years since we started using it. At the time, the products we were using took a lot of manual effort to make sure that we were blocking unwanted emails. When we moved to SpamTitan, it alleviated some of that daily work that we'd have to do to make sure we were getting clean email.

Their general spam filtering and the logging of the history are helpful.

They have a low false-negative detection. We have a lot of control over what is filtered and what isn't through creating our own rule sets.

We also use SpamTitan's geo-blocking feature. We started using that when it became available as we were doing that ourselves on-prem. We started using that when it became available last year. It allows you to block spam emails entering your network and servers, reducing your spam intake. Being able to block a whole country that our customers don't deal with is just an easy way to not even have to process those spam messages. 

I'm not sure if I can approximate by how much we've reduced our spam intake by using this feature, however. We tend to geo-block based on the country, not the IP. So far, it works. It's easy to set up and easy to make exceptions, based on either IP or domain, in case there is some email from a country that we're blocking that we have to allow through. It's very important due to the fact that we're a government agency. Blocking emails from certain countries, especially during times like this, where there are a lot of attacks coming in, helps keep us safe.

In general, the user interface is good. SpamTitan's overall intuitiveness is okay. 

The solution has saved us time. We went from doing work every day to maybe a couple of times a week to make sure the emails we are getting are clean.

The interface could be updated. I wish it was a little bit more modern. It's been the same interface for ten years and some aspects are hard to find, even after using it for years. If you don't go to a certain feature often, you have to dig around to find it sometimes. Therefore, the layout or structure of it could probably be better. 

In terms of intuitiveness, the main daily admin use is fine, however, some of the special configuration areas don't seem to be logically laid out compared to other products that we use.

The only other issue we've had is with searching the logs. It has a field for searching the "from user", yet does not have a "header from". Sometimes it's difficult to find an email when the "from" and "header from" are different, as we're only able to search the from field. This is difficult compared to other products that we use.

I've used the solution for about ten years. 

The stability is good. I'd say it's around an eight out of ten. We've had a couple of issues with running out of memory or disk space. However, support has always been able to adjust things to get them back working.

We haven't really expanded it. We have about 5,000 mailboxes that go through it. We've adopted it 100%. We do plan to increase usage.

Their support has always been very good. They're always responsive. You get to the person that is going to be working on it immediately. You don't have these different support levels to get through to get your question answered or the problem fixed.

It's very good. It's one of our best supports on any of the products that we have.

Positive

The initial setup was relatively easy. SpamTitan support helped us get it initially configured. It wasn't difficult on our side. Some of the rules we had to manually enter, and if we had a large batch of things that needed to be inputted, we could send it to their help desk, and they would make the changes for us. They were very helpful with getting it up and running.

For the deployment, I had it up and running on the same day and we were able to point our email to it.

We did have some assistance from technical support.

We have seen an ROI. Mostly due to the fact that it freed up man-hours of dealing with spam on a daily basis.

The pricing is definitely reasonable. Compared to Office 365 Defender, it's a lot cheaper.

We actually use multiple levels or multiple vendors of spam filtering. SpamTitan is our primary one. Then we have another one behind it. Then, some of our customers that have Office 365 have 365 checking things also.

SpamTitan is definitely easier to manage than the others. We haven't compared to any others that have been primary filtering, however, it's done a good job on filtering. Of course, no spam protection is 100%. That's why we run multiple solutions.

In terms of advice to others, I would say if the customer wants to get very detailed in their spam filtering and if they need something to formulate the specific patterns, this is a good solution to look into.

I'd rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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.

SpamTitan is the email filter we use to drastically reduce the amount of spam we get in our inboxes. We're deployed at two physical locations with several departments. Altogether, it's about 360 email accounts.

SpamTitan has freed up our employees to be more productive. They don't need to waste time sifting through a bunch of garbage emails. I'd say it's at least a 50 percent improvement. It has had a huge impact on our spam. You can go in every day and look at the amount of emails that are blocked. It's doing an outstanding job.

The safelist and blocklist are the best parts. If I've got a new contact coming in, I can safelist that domain or email address. Alternatively, I can block the domain or the email address if I'm getting harassed by someone. I like the ability to get down to that granular level if I need to block or allow an entire domain.

Emails from companies we work with often get flagged, and I have to go in and release them. For example, I made a hotel reservation today from Marriott that got blocked. I'm sure hotels spam people, but I wish there was a way to know that the email was to confirm my reservation and for it to allow that through.

We've been using SpamTitan for around two years.

We're pleased with SpamTitan's stability so far. We've had just zero issues with it. The stability is probably about the same, but the previous solution didn't catch spam the way SpamTitan does.

SpamTitan scales easily. 

TitanHQ's support is excellent. I rate them eight out of 10. 

Positive

We were using Office 365's built-in filter, but I needed something more robust. I did some research online and tried a SpamTitan demo. It seemed to do an excellent job, so we went with it.

Setting up SpamTitan is very straightforward, and it took a couple of days to deploy. You only need to make a couple of DNS changes, and it's ready to go. It doesn't require much maintenance after deployment. Occasionally, I go in and safelist an email or a domain when someone's expecting an email but not getting it. I check to see if the filter caught it. Once I mark it as safe, we don't have any more issues.

We leaned on SpamTitan's tech support to help us get up and running.

We have seen a return on investment.

I think the price is fair for the service we're getting.

We looked at other options, including McAfee. I can't remember the others, but I looked at about four or five options. Ultimately, it came down to price and performance.

I rate TitanHQ SpamTitan eight out of 10. When you deploy SpamTitan you should consider the filter sensitivity and how strict you want it to be. That may need to be tweaked with each individual organization. SpamTitan gives you a baseline of sensitivity to start with, and that number may need to be adjusted for your organization.

We use TitanHQ to provide email security. It sits on Office 365 and protects all emails coming into our domain and going out of our domain.

We have been able to reduce the spam count and the number of phishing attacks, which were higher before we started using SpamTitan. Our reputation has also improved because our internal and external clients are happy with the level of protection provided by this solution.

We are satisfied with the performance and spam filtering provided by TitanHQ SpamTitan. The reporting feature and customizations as per our requirements are also good.

We use SpamTitan's geo-blocking feature to block spam emails entering our network and servers. We have created rules to block certain emails, and the geo-blocking feature has reduced our spam intake by 100%. 

I would give a ten out of ten for the geo-blocking feature for restricting emails from specific destinations based on IP or country.

Our employees don't have to sort through junk and spam emails now, which saves time. Also, they have the option to release and whitelist emails that have been placed in the quarantine folder. It's a user-level feature. It has substantially improved our efficiency by 70% to 80%.

We are using the data center version with a dedicated server. It would be more user-friendly if SpamTitan were centralized. That is, TitanHQ should have a SaaS model for SpamTitan.

We've been using this solution for two years.

SpamTitan's stability is good; I'd rate it at eight out of ten. In comparison, I'd rate the stability of Trend Micro and Microsoft ATP at six or seven out of ten.

TitanHQ's technical support staff respond quickly to our emails, and they've had the right level of expertise to handle our concerns or issues. I'd give them an eight out of ten.

Trend Micro's technical support is at the same level as that of SpamTitan, whereas Microsoft's technical support is at a lower level. We have experienced delays with Microsoft.

Positive

We previously used Trend Micro and Microsoft ATP. SpamTitan has the edge over Microsoft ATP because it is more user-friendly. Microsoft ATP was very complicated to configure, but SpamTitan can be customized for our own requirements.

SpamTitan helped us to deploy the solution, and they maintain it as well.

SpamTitan has competitive pricing and flexible licensing. They allow up to 10% more that you use and then add it to the next tier of licenses.

We evaluated Trend Micro and Symantec email security and chose SpamTitan because it is user-friendly and cheaper than the other two products.

I would recommend SpamTitan and rate it at eight on a scale from one to ten.

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.

SpamTitan for our clients, and it's there just as a spam filter for them.

It reduces the number of support calls and investigations into suspicious emails.

It's not something the clients think about after the initial rollout. It just becomes part of their daily work. The advantage is that the client doesn't have to think about things or spend too much time sorting through things as the vast majority is done before they get anywhere near it.

The geo-blocking feature blocks spam emails from entering the network and servers, reducing spam intake. It has probably reduced spam intake by about 80%. It mainly restricts based on the country of origin, which is something the client doesn't think about, but it's important to me because I have to pick up the pieces.

The geo-blocking feature allows exemptions based on a trusted sender's IP, domain, or email address. The feature is there, and it does work. It's not something that we have to change too often.

It has helped save employees time by not having to sort through junk and spam emails. The whole point of doing it is that end-users don't have to troll through hundreds of spurious emails. If they don't see them, they get a list each morning, and they can decide if any of them is worth releasing.

It has drastically reduced the amount of time that employees spend going through emails. They only get the ones they should.

It has improved the spam catch rate and reduced the organization’s false positive rate. That's the whole point of it. Otherwise, we wouldn't use the service. There is a 70% to 80% improvement.

We are an MSP of TitanHQ. The aspect of TitanHQ’s technology that helps us acquire new customers and add value to our services or product offerings is that it's very quick to roll out. It's very quick and easy to configure, and it's very quick and easy to modify as required.

TitanHQ’s key differentiator for its partners is simplicity. Some of the other packages that we use are quite complex and awkward and not necessarily easy to configure or logical.

Its simplicity is most valuable. It does what we ask it to do. The filters work, and we are able to set the levels and give the clients or end-user access to the quarantine through a simple email. It works in a very straightforward method and doesn't require a lot of maintenance.

A lot of the other companies that I deal with have a feature that allows you to modify emails and apply signatures automatically based on linking into Azure's servers and database. That feature isn't there in SpamTitan. 

Others have the facility to remove certain bits of text. For example, if somebody sends an email from their iPhone, it always says, "Sent from my iPhone." On a couple of other services that we use, a feature is available to strip known phrases and also to strip things like obscenities from emails that are being sent, just in case you have an employee who is misbehaving.

We have been using SpamTitan for three years.

I've had no issues with it. So, it has got to be very stable.

Its stability is on par with the other solutions that I have used. Stability was never an issue.

It's scalable. You can go as far as you like or as low as you like. You can go from one user to 200 users very quickly and very easily.

It's deployed on multiple locations, multiple devices, and multiple platforms. There are just under 40 users for this one.

It has been very good. I've not had much need to use their support, but when I needed their support, it was there. Their support was very good in terms of expertise, attentiveness, and speed of response. I would rate them a nine out of ten. Nobody gets a ten.

Positive

We were using Mimecast. We switched because SpamTitan was a simpler solution, and it was also cheaper.

It's a cloud solution. It's on Azure, and it's all Microsoft based.

The initial deployment was very straightforward. We required a couple of tweaks, which the support team sorted out in a reasonable time. 

The deployment took about 30 minutes. It was very easy to set up, configure, and then use SpamTitan. It doesn't require any maintenance.

It was just me.

I suppose we have seen an ROI. We do make a margin on it. I don't have the metrics because it's just a revenue stream at the end of the day. We could earn more money off some of the other products that are out there on the market, but that wouldn't necessarily suit the client.

It's priced very reasonably. There are no additional licensing costs that affect me.

I looked at some of the other solutions, including BitDefender and Kaspersky, as well as Mimecast. SpamTitan stood out in terms of the simplicity of the system.

I would definitely recommend this product. I would rate it an eight out of ten. It just lacks a couple of features.

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.

It is an effective email filter, however, it's increased over time since they have new features that expand the offering. We use it for more security-based uses. 

We are able to report on various different odds and ends as we see some increase in spam. We do so using the base and logic that's built into it and it is helpful. It allows us to use some deep learning features to proactively block spam. It's really been one of the most effective spam filters that I've worked with for an on-premises solution.

The Link Lock feature with SpamTitan Plus has been great. We're all pretty familiar with the technology. That said, as we work throughout our day, we're moving fast and people won't always spend the time to diagnose potential danger before they click. This is why that feature alone saved us tremendously.

There are a couple of incidents where we had to do triage when somebody clicked on a link. The Link Lock feature prevents anything bad from happening. It stops it right at the gate. It gets people to actively think and also helps us train our staff. We get reports of, "oh, you know this, why am I seeing this prompt?" It naturally puts that little bit of a mental block in between the process, and that alone is tremendous. It's overwhelmingly beneficial just as a general-purpose mail filter. We saw benefits from it immediately.

We typically won't roll out a new product to all users. We did some initial testing, rolled it out to some of the staff, and eventually rolled it out to all the staff. It's still highly beneficial.

SpamTitan Plus is another feature that we use, but it's primarily an email filter or email security facilitating appliance.

The features that we're finding to be most valuable are mostly those that leverage the quarantine and some of the reporting functions. We like all the blacklist details and the day-to-day reports that it generates for spam and users. All of that is highly tunable, which is much appreciated.

The new SpamTitan Plus with the Link Lock feature is great. We implemented it and use it as well.

We use SpamTitan's geo-blocking feature. It allows us to block spam emails that enter our network and servers and reduces our spam intake. Some of those features are also fantastic as they enable us to report on, for example, who's the most active spam relays. We can see all IPs when going into the console. We've integrated a process where we review SpamTitan and then add those kinds of details in order to block both efforts. If a user has any issues, I can use the reporting feature and see what is being blocked through geo-blocking or what is being blocked by our firewall appliance.

It saves us time. All of our changes are really pretty quick. As far as time-saving goes, if I compare it to a previous solution like Postini, which is an old Google product that was very similar, SpamTitan is easier to navigate. When I started to use SpamTitan, I discovered that it was actually much easier to administer than Postini, which helped save admin time.

In terms of geo-blocking, most of the reporting functionality is baked into SpamTitan, it relays all those details and shows us what IPs are relaying spam. We go through a process where we start wide, and we don't open up a lot due to the geo IP blocking. It can be really dangerous if we don't use that sparingly. By looking at the reports that SpamTitan generates, we can go and add those details to the geo-blocking feature and make some decisions based on that. This is mission-critical. It's the first line of defense. Email is something that every organization leaves exposed to the internet and it's constantly being attacked. Email is where the number one cause of phishing scams originate which is why it's 110% mission-critical.

SpamTitan helped save employees time by not having them sort through junk and spam emails. Being able to create that and have it generate the quarantine reports, keeps everything consolidated. I can dial it in to what I like. If I want to go extreme or want to go light, it gives me those options.

Quite a bit of time was previously spent sorting through unwanted junk. That was one of the biggest complaints. When I started to dig into it, I was pretty amazed at how quickly I was able to rectify just going through the console. It has options too for being able to go and administer user accounts, so as an admin, I can go through and make decisions and choices before the user even sees it. Typically, we require that people check their quarantine at least once or twice a day. As an admin, I may go through and see what is happening before the end-user notices it. With one person we can tackle that task versus everyone in the company having to do it individually, which compounds exponentially.

The spam catch rate and false positives before versus after implementation were night and day. When I first started it, they hadn't done a lot of the tuning. Then, once I started to ratchet down the tuning it changed overnight. At that point, I was getting compliments from the staff.

They really just need to continue to roll out new features. They constantly develop this product. We get updates at least once a quarter and sometimes multiple times per quarter. We investigate new trends for spam relays or malware, and the SpamTitan team constantly adds new features to it to address what we find. They constantly improve what they've got, which we appreciate and we hope they continue to do.

They can increase some of the reporting around user logins. In order for us to make that determination, we have to pull down reports. They could make it a bit easier.

The finesse of the reporting could probably be improved. Being able to filter and generate reports and being able to ship those reports to different users would be ideal. It's got some of those features built-in, however, increasing some of that could be beneficial. For the work that we do and with the way we administer it, oftentimes we have to pull down logs and rig through the logs to find out what happened. Maybe some additional reporting as to why it flagged spam would be useful and the reasoning behind why it actually flagged email X. Or, if we get a false positive, then explain why. Right now, we do a manual process where we go through the logs. If they increase the level of reporting, we’d pretty much have a perfect product.

I've been using this solution for about six to seven years. It was implemented before I started with the company.

The stability is great. I've never had a problem with it.

I had problems with Postini on a couple of different occasions, however, it was also an off-premises solution too. I also had my WAN that's involved in that connection and Google's far-end servers. With this solution running on-premises, I forget what they run an OS on it. However, it's a Unix-like operating system that runs well, it will process updates, and we've never had an issue with an update. It just keeps going.

In terms of scalability, I've never really investigated it as we really didn't have much of a need to. I do know that it's got high availability features and it's pretty easy to set up. It's also got an API call that you can implement with it too. If you wanted to manage it with some other kind of NMS or something like that, you can, as it has those capabilities. We don't particularly have a need for it. There's less of an attack vector.

SpamTitan's support is amazing. They answer any questions you have 24/7. The way they can connect remotely to help diagnose problems is great. I've never had a bad experience with their support team.

I can't think of another vendor that I work with that has better support than SpamTitan. They either give me a solution, give a workaround, or explain what's going on nearly immediately.

Positive

The last solution I used was Postini before Google retired it. That was almost a decade ago. I don't think Postini is still around anymore.

I didn't necessarily make the switch, it was already in production. I'm not really interested in another product. Purely from a support standpoint alone, in a world where customer support is all but dead, SpamTitan consistently delivers.

I was not involved in the initial setup, however, when they deployed it, it was very light. They didn't take advantage of a lot of the features and it's got a very deep feature set too.

Some of my support engagements are purely just asking questions, however, they never give me a whole look at the manual or pawn me off. They answer the question almost immediately.

In terms of the environment we have, it pretty much sits at the gate for all of our inbound emails and it's used for the entire company. If you categorize this into a smaller to medium business category, it handles less than 50 users. 

Other than standard updates, this solution doesn't require any maintenance. We have five or so people who can handle the maintenance aspect. They are there mostly to maintain the quarantine, watch, regulate the product, and continue to tune it over time.

The ROI from a SpamTitan license is pretty good.

It pays for itself. If it mitigated one event then it's paid for itself. These days, if ransomware gets into your network and takes over, you can have a really, really hard time. The cost per the ROI on it is tremendous for sure.

The solution is very affordable. 

I didn't look into other options. I really didn't feel like there was a need to.

We have it on a single server on-premises. It's the latest release. 

We do not use ArcTitan or EncryptTitan. We have other solutions that we work with for those use cases. I would use them if we didn't already have that kind of other processes that we look at. We just don't have a business need for it.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten. I recommend it to anyone that's looking for a solution like this. I'd advise potential users to just buy it and figure it out and they'll be there to help you. Their support is excellent. I cannot say enough good things about them.