TitanHQ SpamTitan Reviews

We use SpamTitan, in our role as an MSP, for all of our customers across the board. We set them up on SpamTitan to protect their emails, inbound and outbound. It will scan everything for spam, junk, viruses, dodgy attachments, and spoofing.

It's on the cloud. We have SpamTitan Private Cloud with two dedicated servers that live on Amazon AWS and they are only used by us.

The collaboration between us, as an MSP, and TitanHQ in terms of positioning us to acquire new business, is spot-on. I have meetings with our account manager every quarter to go through what's happening with TitanHQ and learn about new products that they're offering. They will also ask how we're doing and whether we have anything big coming up, to see what they can do to support us through it.

Their partner program is excellent when it comes to partner profitability. TitanHQ is phenomenal.

The solution has also helped to improve our spam catch rate and reduce our false positive rate, by at least 50 percent.

In addition, it helps save employees' time by not having to sort through junk and spam email. It just works. With SpamTitan we set it up and that was it. We left it to it to do its job and it does it. It's saving us at least four or five hours a week.

The aspects of TitanHQ's technology that help us acquire new customers and add value to our services are its ease of use and functionality. It's a brilliant product. It sounds amazing when you first look at it, and it does what it says it will do.

The key differentiator of TitanHQ for its partners is the Sandboxing Service. The email filtering will open up any attachments and run them through two antivirus sandboxes before they reach you. You can pretty much guarantee there's not going to be a virus in them. I've not seen anyone else do that.

Also, the solution's overall intuitiveness is fantastic. Everything, from our experience dealing with the people at TitanHQ, to setting the product up, where you can literally change every single setting down to the fine details, has been great.

The SpamTitan user interface is not amazing, but I don't mind it. I know they are releasing a new one soon. I have seen it and it looks a lot better. That has been an area that needs improvement.

We have been using TitanHQ SpamTitan since December 2019, making it just over two years.

It just works. It has never broken in all the time that we've been using it. I don't think there are any other products we use that I can say have never stopped working.

We're close to our limit now, so I need to speak to them to increase it. But as soon as it starts needing more resources, it uses them automatically. We have about 2,000 users on it.

The biggest benefit of being a partner of TitanHQ is the support. We very rarely have issues, but whenever we do, it is sorted within minutes.

I've never known a support team, for any of the products that we use, to come back as quickly as TitanHQ's support does. I had a query with them a few days ago about another product that we're using, EncryptTitan. It wasn't a problem, it was just a question that I had, and within about 10 minutes I had my answer.

The solution that we used previously, Reflexion, was brilliant at the time, but they stopped developing it and it became a nightmare to use. It required constant work. The stability of SpamTitan versus that of Reflexion is a million times better.

The setup is as easy or as hard as you want to make it. We made it quite hard because we went through every setting and configured absolutely everything on it. But if you want to just pick it up and run with it, it's really easy.

It took me a full week, including moving all of our customers, to get it deployed.

In terms of the implementation process, I spoke to SpamTitan about it. I asked them what they advised. It was just a case of moving people off our old solution and moving them onto SpamTitan. I had to do it one customer at a time to make sure that nothing broke in the process. TitanHQ were really helpful through that process.

We've started reselling SpamTitan to another MSP. We provide SpamTitan to them and they provide it to their customers. We support it for them. We're like the middleman between them and SpamTitan. That creates ROI because it's like free money since TitanHQ do all of the work. We support it if that MSP has any issues, but because it just works, they don't have issues.

Compared to all of the others, including the solution we used previously, SpamTitan is cheaper.

We went through five or six options, including the big ones like Barracuda. And Sophos has a new product out.

With SpamTitan, you get a lot more control. And the support is amazing. It also has more features, such as the Sandboxing Service. Some of the others have started to offer that now but, at the time, it was only SpamTitan that offered sandboxing through two different antivirus products. And obviously, pricing helped.

They are constantly adding new products. SpamTitan is the way to go. I won't use anything else.

We use it to catch and to help reduce spam, malware, and viruses coming into mailboxes.

It's all on cloud, using their servers that are hosted on AWS.

One of the aspects of the solution that helps us acquire new customers, as a solution provider, is the ability to scrub inbound and outbound emails. The big selling point is that you don't send a customer a virus or some malware or grayware. We bundle it in automatically for all of our new customers. People don't have a choice. Most of our customers don't care which tools we use, as long as they're protected. When they ask, "Are we protected?" We say, "Yes." We have done our due diligence and that's why we picked SpamTitan.

One of the benefits of being a partner with TitanHQ is that their help has been responsive. Our new account manager is quite responsive and keeps us abreast of all the updates coming down the pipe from them.

Their partner program is good when it comes to partner profitability. We can make money off of them, on our margins. We can make money on what we sell.

And in terms of benefits for clients, we had a site with an on-premises Exchange that went down for three or four days. With SpamTitan's ability to spool emails, no emails were lost or bounced during that transition. That is one of the features that people love. But with everything going into Office 365, if that's down, there's nothing you can do.

Overall, our security has gotten better and spam detection has gone up.

Among the features that led us to choose SpamTitan are the 

• ability to lock down
• multiple layers of security they have built into it
• ability to scrub inbound and outbound
• higher-level SPF and DMARC capabilities that were not really built into our previous product.
  

The user interface of SpamTitan is fair, at best. They're coming out with a new one. The current one is a bit hard to navigate, and that was the biggest part of what made it a steep learning curve. It took three to six months to learn how to find stuff in there. It took us a while to ramp up everything. I would rate the intuitiveness as "low" because you can't find things. Now, I know where things are, but initially, it's a steep learning curve when we have new people come on board.

There are also some issues with false positives. And when 15 to 20 people reply to a mass email, either in-house or an external one, SpamTitan blocks them, which causes issues. They go into the outbound quarantine, where users have to go in and manage it. That becomes a false positive, although it's actually doing what it's supposed to. But it can be annoying to the end-user.

In addition, the problem with the daily quarantine report is that our customers can't whitelist or blacklist based on it. That is a feature that may be coming out. There was an Outlook add-on, a toolbar, but that doesn't work reliably across different versions of Outlook, or even the same versions of Outlook.

The biggest beef we hear from customers is that they can't manage it right from the email. They can do an "allow" from the email, but they can't block a spam email without the toolbar or logging into the portal. That means they have to go through multiple steps and that's the part that they don't like. We hear that a lot. With other solutions, if I get a junk email I can open it up and at the bottom there will be a footer that says "block." That's not available with SpamTitan. We try to have customers look at the daily report, and they can allow right from the report, but they can't block. They have to go through multiple screens to block an email, without that Outlook toolbar, which has had issues. TitanHQ is aware of all of this.

I've been using TitanHQ SpamTitan for a little bit over two years.

The stability has been very good. We have a cluster of two servers so that if one fails, the other one picks it up. Clustering was one of the key features we wanted and was something that wasn't offered by other providers. We didn't want to go through the downtime thing again. That's why we have the cluster. Stability is of incredibly high importance to us. People rely on email every day for orders, processing, and communication. If it's down and not able to do its job, companies and people can't do their jobs.

The scalability is strong; very good. We have about 600 users. We'll continue adding new customers to SpamTitan. We already have a lot of this stuff in our firewalls and other spots. In terms of increasing usage, at this point, it's just status quo and using what they have. And we'll review some of their add-ons later.

We have probably pushed almost 5 million messages through SpamTitan.

Their support has been very responsive and helpful. The only issue is that support is located in Ireland and we're in Portland, Oregon. The time difference has been a challenge at times. It's not their fault, but when you need immediate help sometimes somebody is there, if it's an immediate or a system down.

Their tech support is very good compared to the support provided by companies with competing solutions. That's an important aspect.

Positive

We switched from a previous vendor, Reflexion Networks, that was bought by Sophos. They then had an outage for over a week or so and we decided to move. Another reason we switched was that they hadn't done any dev on it in years. They were sunsetting the product and they weren't bringing out any new features. When Sophos bought them I believe they were going to migrate everybody to their platform and we didn't want to move to Sophos at that time.

It was difficult to set up. It just wasn't intuitive. And the sales guy we had sold us pie in the sky and we had to deal with support quite a bit. There were a lot of tickets and a lot of initial frustration about why things weren't working. But once we cracked the code for a couple of customers, then the rest were a lot easier. The first three or four were rough.

That's why a better interface would be helpful. They're aware of the fact that they were taking everything any partner wanted and jamming it into the old interface. It went probably from a "Toyota Camry" to a "Ford Expedition" hauling a trailer. That happens in software development. They're supposed to be streamlining that. And that's the part that's hard: finding things. When you talk to support they say, "Go here," and then you think, "Oh, there it is." The interface isn't intuitive.

I don't feel we were onboarded very well. It was like a hodgepodge of answers from our sales rep and customer service. There was never a planned onboarding process. What wasn't there was a statement like, "We'll walk you through everything you need to do." A better onboarding process would be best for new partners. They should walk new partners through the first couple of setups.

There was also the issue of helping our end-users and customers understand the changes that we were making and the different reports. 

But since we got it set up, it's been fine with no issues. We have two people who are responsible for the maintenance of the solution, a network engineer and our help desk central services.

The first couple of setups took at least a week, including the settings and all the other stuff they had to have us add into Office 365. Now, it takes us an hour to set up a new customer.

We have seen ROI from the solution. The price point is right and we're able to make a margin on it. We're actually making it profitable, rather than breaking even.

The cluster was an additional cost. We had to get some more licenses to get to that level. It's well worth it because it means peace of mind for everyone.

We researched and demoed several solutions, and TitanHQ came out of that on top. We looked at Barracuda, SonicWall, and Zerospam. We went with TitanHQ because of the price and features.

TitanHQ's key differentiators, for its partners, are the pricing and support.

We use SpamTitan as a complement to Office 365 because it works well with Outlook and blocks malware and spam.

I like SpamTitan's email sandboxing. It is very effective and blocks almost 99% of spam. It also has zero-day threat protection.

The IT team has seen more time savings than the end users. The end users used to call frequently to have us check whether an email was safe. However, with SpamTitan, these emails don't arrive in the end user's inbox.

The end-user has seen a 50% reduction in spam with SpamTitan. The percentage could be higher, but we have not configured SpamTitan with a higher level of security. This is because we did not want to lose important images from customers or providers who don't have a good score. It's been working well for us so far, and we haven't had any issues with high false positive rates.

The analysis of ransomware attachments could be improved. Other solutions seem to detect ransomware faster than SpamTitan does.

It would be great if the commercial and support teams in Latin America spoke Spanish.

We've been using SpamTitan for almost five years.

We haven't had any issues with stability during the last five years.

It's easy to increase the number of users or the volume of emails in the cloud version. I emailed partner support or SpamTitan's support, and they increased the capacity. We have approximately 2,000 users with SpamTitan.

TitanHQ's technical support is good. They're quick to respond to emails and to correct any issue we may have. On a scale from one to ten, I'd give them a nine.

Positive

The initial setup process was fast. It's very easy to set up and use. One person can manage the solution once it's implemented; it is a lightweight solution.

We implemented the solution with the help of a SpamTitan partner. Their level of expertise was great.

SpamTitan has protected us from ransomware attacks, and that is a return on investment. We have seen this ROI in one year.

The pricing is great, but it has been increasing on a yearly basis. It is now close to that of Microsoft solutions. If it continues to increase, then clients may need to migrate to a different solution.

We evaluated solutions from Microsoft and Cisco before choosing SpamTitan. The solutions from Microsoft and Cisco were too expensive.

My advice would be to try SpamTitan. It is not as well known as Microsoft or Cisco, but it is a great solution. SpamTitan blocks malware and spam like other solutions do but at a lower cost. It is a good solution with great pricing.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate SpamTitan at ten.

We are using it to filter our email. We have its latest version.

Previously, we were getting too much junk mail in the inbox. It gives us more time to focus on work rather than deleting emails.

It lowers the amount of junk email you have to go through and delete.

There should probably be a little more explanation on why one day, the email from one company goes into quarantine, and the next day, it doesn't. To me, it is a little bit random at times.

I have been using this solution for about five years.

We haven't had any issues.

There doesn't seem to be any scalability issue. We send all the emails through their servers, and each individual can tweak it as desired.

It is being used on desktop PCs. It is being used by a number of users in-house, on the road, or in other cities.

Their support is average. I would rate them a six out of ten.

Neutral

We used a hardware-based solution in-house. I can't recall its name, but it was a piece of hardware in-house.

It was a little bit complex. There wasn't enough information or handholding to get started with it. Some of the rules just didn't make sense.

Its basic configuration wasn't hard, but there was not enough explanation on the difference between the levels, what you're filtering out, and how close attention you need to pay to your report every day.

We implemented it on our own. It doesn't require any maintenance from our side.

We did evaluate other options. I liked that it is cloud-based, and it continuously updates without me having to deal with it.

I would advise asking more questions prior to setting up the quarantine levels.

I would rate it a seven out of ten.

We have it in front of Microsoft 365 for spam filtering.

SpamTitan's geo-blocking feature is very exciting. On my old server, we spent quite a lot of time building countrywide address blocks. Now, that is completely redundant with the geoblocking. To be fair, it's not just SpamTitan that does it. I see it in lots of places. We do that regularly on firewalls.

But if we're building a new system for people, we'll say, "Do you communicate with any high-risk countries?" If they say, "Yeah, probably. What are the high-risk countries?" we can say, "We have a list of what we considered high-risk, and we can block all of those in one tick." They will say, "Yeah, please, because we get a lot of spam from various countries." That's great. And I presume that it's updated fairly regularly.

When we implemented the geoblocking, it made an immediate and obvious difference to the amount of spam that was being quarantined. It reduced the amount of spam by more than 50 percent.

Doing geoblocking by IP is hard work. It's possible, but the nature of spam is that it's sent out by the spammers using botnets and VPNs to cover their tracks. There's a lot of to-and-fro in the war against spam, but knocking out a whole dodgy country is very good.

Also, when we talk to our customers about cyber security and they mention they have spam and viruses coming in through their email, we can tell them what we can do to help resolve that. We would then look with them at either the time savings or the cost savings, versus the investment they'd have to make in the SpamTitan licensing and say, "When you look at the benefits, they are going to be much greater than the costs. Why would you not do it?"

And once customers have that kind of focus when looking at the issue, they'll make a choice and they'll stick with it. They'll probably have it in place for years because it becomes "a part of the furniture." They take it as a given that they've got protection. They're happy with what it's doing. It's removing swaths of malware and nuisance emails and they're happy that it works.

When looking at our own organization, it used to be the case that people would be looking at their inboxes every day and clearing out junk. They could potentially spend an average of about 15 minutes doing that at the beginning of a day, and perhaps have a few more goes at tidying things up through the day. Before we were using SpamTitan, every person in our company would be losing half an hour or more, every day, just de-junking their inboxes. To take that down, now, to a matter of seconds through a quick scan of the quarantine or a report is really great.

And overall, it has definitely improved our spam catch rate.

One of the most valuable features is the opportunity to quarantine things. In addition, the option to have somebody manage the quarantine on behalf of users, or to let the system send out daily reports so that users can manage things on their own, are both very straightforward.

Slightly larger customers in particular have different requirements from those at the very small end. For the larger ones, applying global rules is difficult because, even within one organization, there are many teams, such as sales at one end and accounts at the other end. That means that the types of emails that each team is processing can be very different. If all you have is a solution that looks at every piece of email and applies the same types of rules, you don't get a very smart solution. Whereas, if you can do it per mailbox or per domain, like you can with SpamTitan, that means you are effectively able to configure it almost per-user, which is great.

The user interface is fine. It's fairly quick. Sometimes it's a little bit slow in loading a quarantine list, but it's nothing that's too painful or a problem. The user interface is very workable. In terms of the solution's intuitiveness, it all makes sense.

I have noticed that TitanHQ adds new features quite frequently. If I have one little feature request, it would be that they shout a little bit more about the new features they're adding. I haven't blocked them from sending me marketing emails and I wouldn't be averse to having more of them, particularly for the new features. That's really important because it gives us an opportunity to go to customers and prospects and say, "Look, this is our preferred product, and here is what they've just brought out now."

Also, false positives may be an area for improvement. It's very rare that we see false negatives, but false positives might be an area where I, myself, could put some more effort into looking at the settings. There are various settings that could probably be optimized. Perhaps that's something in the user interface that isn't hugely clear. There is a spam score threshold through which you can reject spam when an item has greater score than the setting. I wouldn't call it counterintuitive, but it takes a little bit of thought. Having set it up, it works very well, so I am happy with it.

Finally, a minor point is that I looked at another system that had the ability to deliver to multiple inbound servers, which is something I don't think SpamTitan does, although I haven't followed up by going back to my own installation of SpamTitan to see if could I set that up there. But it's not a big deal. Most people are not going to be doing really complicated things like having multiple inbound mail servers with completely different addresses.

We have been using TitanHQ SpamTitan for more than three years. We initially bought a three-year package and that was renewed a few months ago.

The stability is fine. I don't think I've ever seen an outage of any sort.

I can't see that there would be an issue when it comes to scalability. If the software is managing millions of transactions a day, it's not going to make very much difference if you go from two million to three million a day. I would imagine it is highly scalable.

We've had very little need to talk to tech support. That says it all. I'm very satisfied with how the support works.

But for partners like us, it's the ease of access to the company that is one of the key differentiators. I'm not sure of the size of TitanHQ in comparison to some of the others, but I'm a great believer in working with SME providers. Quite often, we find that the smaller providers are much more nimble in their relations with their partners and also with their development roots. Some of the huge companies are lumbering, clumsy organizations. While it's not that I'm on a first-name basis with all of the people in TitanHQ, because that's far from the truth, the relationship with them is a lot closer than, say, the relationship with Microsoft, which is a company that it's never easy to get close to.

To be fair and realistic about it, this is just one of the solutions that we have in our portfolio. Potentially, we could put more effort into looking at the marketing resources TitanHQ have. That connects back to what I said before, that I wouldn't object to having a bit more of a push from their side regarding new features and marketing initiatives. That would prompt me to take opportunities actively, as opposed to reactively from customers when they say, "What do we do about spam?"

Positive

We originally went with Microsoft’s built-in spam filtering but decided it was rubbish. We looked around for a better solution and chose SpamTitan.

Microsoft 365 is stable but it's just inadequate. It has typical, crazy Microsoft logic behind it, whereas SpamTitan looks like something that has been developed by people who understand the problem they needed to solve. Its basic technology is very much better than Microsoft's.

SpamTitan was very easy when it came to the setup and configuration and it's easy to use. It would make it an uphill struggle if it was difficult to configure. We do get situations with other products where "difficult to install" can actually be a complete showstopper. That does not apply to SpamTitan. It's very easy to install.

For example, I have a customer that has changed their order processing software three times during the relationship over many years. While the latest one that they have, which looks very slick and modern on the face of it, the installation process is absolutely horrible. Even to do things like configuring multiple users on one PC with this particular software, requires a complete, messy uninstall, registry edits, and then a reinstall for a different user. It will not accept having multiple configurations on one PC.

When I compare that with SpamTitan, which, of course, is not working at the PC level but at the network level, that problem is never going to occur. The ease of installation and use is important. If that long-standing customer came to me and said, "We're thinking of changing again. What are the top-three things to look out for?" I would tell them, "Well, this messy installation that you have on the current one is a showstopper because it takes so much time for our team to configure it, and that costs you money."

The closer it gets to plug-and-play, the better.

With SpamTitan, the deployment was trivial. It was very quick. Going from the starting point, where you've got Outlook on a PC talking to Microsoft 365 with nothing between them, through to having SpamTitan in between the two, took minutes. And that's only done once per organization. The benefits of SpamTitan can be seen as soon as you can measure them. It's not something that takes an awful long time to get up to speed. It just works, straight out-of-the-box.

It's a very good product and the pricing and licensing are exceptionally reasonable. TitanHQ's partner program is fine when it comes to partner profitability.

I do potentially have a question about the pricing policy. It works on the basis of billing per mailbox. I thought, "Oh, that's a bit weird," when I first looked into it. On a Microsoft setup—almost everybody we deal with has Microsoft 365—you can have a lot of aliases. In a very small company that has a dozen users, they'll have a dozen mailboxes, but they may have 50 aliases. The SpamTitan product looks at those aliases as individual mailboxes. At the end of the day, that doesn't really matter, because you can count what is the unit of measurement that you're going to use, whether it is a person, a domain, a mailbox, or everything that could be an email address. I don't mind, it works. It's just, perhaps, a slightly quirky way of doing it.

Also, when I did a couple of renewals recently, the salesperson who was talking to me might not have been quite up to speed with the products and the pricing. It took me a few goes, sending emails forwards and back, to actually get an order placed and to get confirmation of the price that we had negotiated. At the end of the day it worked, so it wasn't a problem.

Back in the day, I used to run my own mail servers using Mercury Mail Servers. That was effectively an open-source package which was very straightforward and very manageable. It also had 30 third-party bolt-ons, one of which was a Bayesian spam filtering tool. It would learn on the basis of the training that you gave it, which at the time, I thought, was very clever. These days, there is a lot of spam filtering that is not all that clever. There seem to be quite a few holes in it. But when I did an evaluation of SpamTitan I thought, "Yeah, this is exactly what we want. It has everything." It has filtering, quarantine, blacklisting, and malware protection.

It’s good to be a partner of TitanHQ so that we have something in our portfolio that we can offer to people. However, there's a lot of resistance out there, particularly at the SME end of the market. When we start a discussion about how they do their malware and spam filtering, a lot of people say, "Well, it's all built into Microsoft." We might then get into a discussion along the lines of, “Yeah, it's built into Microsoft, but it's not very good. And it doesn't seem to be getting any better as time goes by, and it's very awkward to use.” Yet, quite often, we run into people who say, "We don't want to pay for an add-on when we think that it can be done with other software packages." This is our challenge when we go to prospects, or to existing customers when we're discussing upselling to them: There is still quite a lot of resistance. It's just one of those things that we have to work to overcome.

My advice would be to come to our office and we'll show it to you in action. We can show you the stats and how easy it is to add things to whitelists and blacklists and  to adjust the parameters. We can show you all these cool features it has.

Using geoblocking for allowing exemptions based on a trusted sender's IP domain or email address is okay, although we haven't done much of that yet. I can envisage situations where potentially we could, but there are cases where I have a bit of a dilemma as to whether to block or whether to not block. China is a good example of that. We could do without getting an awful lot of the stuff that we get from China. But equally, one of our biggest customers is a global manufacturing business and they have a presence in China. I can't really say to them, "Hey, why don't you block China?"

We can always take the position of blocking or not blocking on a per-country basis. And then, if we've blocked and shouldn't have, we can just set up some exceptions and probably come up with the right solution. There's work to be done but that's true of a lot of aspects of cyber security. You've got to put effort into it and you've got to keep updating what you're doing with it.

I've yet to find anybody who would come to us simply on the basis that we provide SpamTitan, but it's definitely a very good value-added tool. For in-house use it's almost invaluable because it goes back to the fundamentals of how you do spam filtering and defense.

Five or six of us who use Office 365 depend on it as our spam filter.  All Remote workers.

I'm pretty sure that SpamTitan has improved our spam catch rate, but we weren't previously monitoring that. Our IT company did so. But I certainly get fewer people coming to me now and saying, "There's a problem here. What's going on spam-wise?" than I used to have with the IT company that was responsible for our email. With our previous solution, not enough spam was being caught.

We know that SpamTitan is doing a reasonable job. We see the things it's catching and the things it's catching are the things you'd want it to, in general. Overall, it is doing exactly what it says on the box, which is exactly what we wanted it to do in terms of separating out stuff. We don't get many false positives at all.

We really like the fact that we get a quarantine report because we can identify for ourselves which emails we want to keep and which we want to get rid of. It also gives us the option of directly allowing emails, which we really like. That way, the next time we get such emails, they're not blocked.

The user interface experience with SpamTitan is great. On a scale of one to 10, I'd give it an eight or nine because it is very straightforward. Overall, the solution is intuitive, particularly for my end users. I'm the one who implemented it, but my end-users find the reports very easy to use when they want to delete or block somebody. We're impressed.

There was a situation in which I needed to change the cloud server. From SpamTitan, I had to specify which server we were on for the integration into Office 365 and I actually only found that out because there was a problem. It would have been better if they had advised us of that first.

I've been using TitanHQ SpamTitan for about two years.

Overall it is very stable. There haven't been any problems with downtime at all.

There have been one or two occasions where I have wondered about that, situations where I've had to try to ascertain whether it's Office 365 or SpamTitan that was the issue, when an email seemed to have gotten lost somewhere along the way. And mostly, it's been Office 365 where the issues were found, not with SpamTitan.

Totally scalable - although we're unlikely to need it to be.

The tech support has been very good. We've not needed to use it very much, but when we have they have come back to us pretty quickly. In general, they have found the issue. Tech support have been very easy to deal with.

Compared to similar solutions I would definitely put SpamTitan's tech support up there. There have been a couple of instances where we've really had to drill down into what the problem was, and they've done what they could to find it. Because we're dealing with Office 365 and SpamTitan, there are times when it's not clear where the conflict is. TitanHQ have been very good at doing their best to help us with that.

Positive

The Email Laundry is what we were using previously, through an external IT  company. What made us switch was the fact that we decided to take IT in-house. The Email Laundry were not willing to deal with us if we weren't a partner.

It was very easy to set up. I did that in conjunction with their customer support initially. If we had had a lot of choices, the ease of the setup would have been a factor in our decision to go with SpamTitan. While I advise on IT, I'm a non-technical IT advisor, so that matters a lot. It matters that what we're looking at is easy to understand.

The deployment took a matter of hours. 

in house.

The cost is reasonable for what we're using. The product is worth it and is certainly solving a problem that we would have if we didn't have it. 

There is something that TitanHQ have come out with recently, which is an upgrade to the next level up. It's some type of real-time blocking. That is out of our reach financially. But what we're using currently is at about the level that we can afford as a not-for-profit organization.

I had to do quite a bit of research into the options available to get the level of spam filtering we needed, given that we're a very small company. The fact that TitanHQ gave us a trial is what enabled us to move forward with it.

As a result of my research, there weren't any other companies on my list. We had to eliminate most of them for the same reason as The Email Laundry, that they weren't willing to deal with a small company.

And SpamTitan is much better because it's more user-friendly. With The Email Laundry, we didn't necessarily get the quarantine reports in quite the way that we do with SpamTitan. And when they did come through, we spent a lot of time trying to work out where the problem was. With SpamTitan, we're going straight to them to get the answer and they're pretty quick at answering.

We don't currently use the geo-blocking feature, but we might. We've got a bigger-picture issue going on due to the fact that we've become a completely remote office, so that might well come into play.

We still do have to look at spam emails because there's an awful lot of junk that comes to SpamTitan, and we have to decide whether or not we want it. But because it's all in the solution's quarantine report, rather than in our inboxes, the spam is in its own space where it can be looked at.

I would definitely recommend it, particularly in our scenario where we're not a large corporation with a whole IT department. It's a good product and I think it's definitely solving an issue that we would have if we didn't have this solution.

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.