What needs improvement with TitanHQ SpamTitan?

SpamTitan advertises anti-spam, anti-phishing, and anti-spear phishing, but it's mostly marketing. They really only do basic anti-spam, nothing more. It's less secure with a lot more spam and false positives than my previous product, OnlyMyEmail. So, there's room for improvement with SpamTitan. It filters some of the spam. But honestly, I could get 90% of the same results by updating my Bayesian filters on my server, which are free.

The product's GUI, dashboard, and speed could be better.

The interface is a little dated aesthetically. I know that's a small thing, but it could use a little bit of a facelift. The only other thing is to have more flexibility for multi-domain environments, but I don't know if it is technically possible. Currently, the sending and receiving is limited to your one domain. If you need to split the sending of emails through using different certificates, you don't have the ability to do that. So, multi-domain flexibility would be nice. Outside of that, technically, I haven't found any problems with it.

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.

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.

With SpamTitan, the false positives and false negatives seem to be higher than those with the product we had previously. The other area for improvement has to do with how to deal with false positives. If something slips through, there's no easy way to mark it as spam globally. The add-in has not been working. We haven't even deployed it to our entire organization yet because it's not working for the few in the pilot project.

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 do have a few users, like the president of our organization, whose email address is everywhere, who still get some spam and we can't really block it because it's always coming from different addresses. Also, it's a bit complex, but if you want a lot of features, it has to be kind of complex, and they have good support. When you can't find something, they help you to find it. SpamTitan doesn't allow you to customize the time reports are sent. Sometimes our users would prefer that it come at a certain time, like 7:00 am so they can make sure they didn't miss anything from the day before. Currently, it can come in the middle of the day and probably depends on the server's restart or the setting change.

Because of the nature of my business, and because I'm a contractor, I get an awful lot of organizations that are spammy in nature with respect to trying to recruit people. SpamTitan is a little more aggressive than I'd like it to be with respect to filtering some of those out, especially when I'm looking for a contract. But it's easy enough because I can go into the quarantine area and say, "Oh, this guy I want to look at, that guy I want to look at," and release them and unblock them if I need to. But for the most part, I would rather have them be more aggressive than be less aggressive.

One of the things that I have been asking them to do is add the ability to scan a domain's age. It seems like the majority of spam right now have been registered with brand new domains. They are utilizing and abusing them for two weeks until they make it onto all the blacklists, then they pick a new one. They just move on. So, if we could scan a domain's age, and just say, "Outright block domains that are less than two weeks old," then it would make SpamTitan even better. They absolutely should be doing that. I would love it if they would do that.

The big issue that I've had is that the length of time that an email is kept in quarantine is only seven days and, in some cases, it is not even seven days. For example, on Monday this week, someone reported she had received some automated messages on Friday night. But by Monday, because it was a DMARC, she couldn't retrieve them and I couldn't find them either. It's great that it grabs things, but I wish that I could tune things more. Perhaps I could have a second quarantine area. Maybe users wouldn't need to access things older than seven days, but if I had a 20-day or 30-day repository, if someone came to me and said, "Hey, I can't get this back," I could end up getting it to them from the archive. That would make my life a lot easier because there have been a few times over the last year when someone has come to me and I said they haven't been able to retrieve an email because it had been simply deleted. Even if it went into some type of cold storage, so it wouldn't cost much, it would give me a way to access them, if need be, even if it took 24 hours for me to access them. Another feature that would be nice would be a button in Outlook to be able to report something as spam so that the system could learn. If an email doesn't get reported as spam and comes through, there's no way to tell it that it is spam. That type of button is important for that feedback because it improves the algorithm. They are working on a button but it still hasn't been implemented.

It would be nice if the reporting feature could be updated. Also, the feel of the web interface is a little dated. It has been the same ever since the days when I first started learning it. It's nice because it's familiar, but I could see how it might turn people off because it's not necessarily flashy.

Its GUI can definitely be improved, both the look and layout. The naming and placement of some of the menus need improvement.

In history on the reporting graph, when you are trying to search for sender by address, it won't search by domain. I could send an email from SendGrid with my domain, but with SpamTitan, if you search by that domain then it wouldn't search it. It only searches from the field, not in the envelope field. Unfortunately, mass mailing companies, like SendGrid, send email with the form address and that completely differs from the domain envelope form address. There is no way to search for the envelope form. So, I gave them an idea to improve this filtering. For example, if I have to search an email sent by SendGrid, then I am forced to search by the recipient, then find the emails marked as spam. This is quite a huge hassle. They told me that they are aware of this and will try to add it, but they haven't added it yet. I would like to implement a secondary delivery pool for mass mailings, having an alternate pool for mass mailing lists since there is only a single mail queue with SpamTitan. For example, if 10,000 emails are being sent, then the queue will be large. Unfortunately, without a secondary delivery pool, legitimate emails will wait in the queue to be delivered to my email. Therefore, I would like to have two queues: one for everyday emails and another for mass mailings. Now, I have to decide whether to buy a second SpamTitan license just for this reason because I am very satisfied with the functionality of SpamTitan overall and don't want to use another sender's appliance for this. From 2020 to 2021, there was a huge switch in the types of spam coming in. SpamTitan's anti-spam should be enabled to catch this spam. The spam catching rate went down over the last three to four years. I think this is because spammers are evolving and using different methods to send spam emails. The phishing rate of SpamTitan is not great, even Exchange Online Protection catches phishing better than SpamTitan. The most worrying are the phishing emails. I would like SpamTitan to upgrade and improve the phishing catch rate. The sandbox of the Bitdefender engine is not working correctly. They sent me an email that they pulled it because it was not working as it was intended to work. So, they are working on this as well, and maybe the sandbox will be fixed. The sandbox is for viruses. If something goes through then it is sent to the sandbox for analysis. However, I am not using the sandbox right now. I am just quarantining this type of attachment right away.

As a Danish company, it would be great to see a Danish translation for the UI.

The admin management portal needs a facelift. I've asked them for a way to authenticate admins of the organizations that want to admin the SpamTitan product itself. Adding additional management security would be a great feature. There are a few tiny improvements they could also make. For instance, the GUI itself is a little outdated, and it could be more user friendly. The same goes for ArcTitan. It's got a horrible GUI that's worse than SpamTitan. It also could use that authentication mechanism upgrade as well. I would also suggest combining the two products into one control panel. The spam filters could always improve. The standard spam protection is probably the least perfect feature. It does a great job with viruses and phishing. The spam filter isn't bad. It's just that spam filtering is its primary purpose, but it's the thing SpamTitan does the least well. That's not a complaint though. It's just a fact of life. You get billions and billions of emails. It's impossible to get a system that perfectly filters out all the trash.

We're so used to it now. If anything, there should be more ease of access for the users. If you're on our mail server, there should be easier access for you to better manage your own mailbox.

Some of the menus on the dashboard could be easier to navigate. It takes a little while to find things.

I am not sure it does URL filtering or checks for phishing, but if it does, then great. That would probably be my room for improvement. I would like it to check for DCIN violations from locations where the email is being sent. Also, I would like it to do sandboxing, e.g., if an attachment is on an email, then it opens that at a different location to ensure that file attachment does not have any malicious aspects to it. There is some room for improvement. Some of the biggest ones are better scanning of emails coming from what source and scanning emails for the content in the email. For example, determining if the email has malicious content in it by scanning the email and attachment. If it does that, then great, but that is very important to my clients and me. It is very important that you know what is in an email before it gets into an office's location. Not only where it is coming from, but what is in it, which is probably more important than where it is coming from. It could be coming from a client's partner or a business that they work with, but what if they get compromised? The perpetrators or bad guys start sending emails to Arcadia Ambulance, and they are infected with scripts and bad stuff. They think, "Okay, this is a legit user," since they get emails from them all the time, then they get hit. That is how a lot of really bad stuff happens. The stability of SpamTitan is equivalent to other email security solutions that I have previously used. Some of them have more bells and whistles that you can add. For example, inside the email subject line, you can put in the words encrypt secret, or secure. Then, it will automatically secure that email and send an email to the person who is supposed to receive it. They can identify it for themselves in a series of different Q&A questions. That is sometimes a deciding factor for clients.

Within the reporting part, when you look at the history of the emails, it would help if it were more intuitive. If you don't know where it is, you have to go through many things to find it. Once you know, it's fine. It's only an issue at the beginning. I would also like to see SpamTitan improve on its antivirus software. I believe they're using Bitdefender and ClamAV. A problem with them is that they sometimes miss Trojans and malicious sites. We have internal antivirus software as well, and when we receive emails we see that our local antivirus software has found Trojans in them. SpamTitan should find better solutions for the antivirus. What they have is not so bad but it's missing some things. Of course, no solution catches 100 percent of what's out there.

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.

SpamTitan doesn't allow you to customize the frequency of reports. Sometimes our users complain that they cannot control how often SpamTitan's report comes. Users get a daily report, but some would prefer a notification every time an email is quarantined. Our previous solution sent out immediate alerts when an email was quarantined. Some people prefer it, but it doesn't matter to me. I get the report when I start my day, and that's fine.

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

The interface is not so user-friendly at the moment. We did attend training a few months ago on their new interface. They have a new GUI that is quite user-friendly and easy to navigate. We would like to improve the number of quarantine reports received per day. At the moment, only one is received within 24 hours. So, there are a number of complaints that we get from customers who want to improve the reporting of the quarantined emails since they only get one copy per day. This means they may not receive other emails that have been received after they get the report. So, we would like SpamTitan to improve on the frequency of the quarantine report.

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.

Before, I didn't know what some of the things would do if turned on, i.e., things that we hadn't used previously. Now, I see that they give you further information on it and take you right to a web page. That is something that I wanted done before and can see that it is there now. I did check this just the other day. That would have been a complaint, but it is not now. Sometimes, things can get caught back in spam that you had previously released. Without going in, releasing the whole domain, and opening it up, since you don't want to do that often because the company can get infected as well, I have a couple of things that I previously released show back up again. I don't understand why this is happening, but I would like to know why it happened, e.g., did an algorithm change? It is important to know if I released an email last week why it was caught in spam the following week.

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

The admin user interface is very granular. Anyone who is in IT can relate to the statement: "With anything granular, there is going to be a little bit of complexity." It can be difficult, on a layer-by-layer basis, to wrap your head around it. Because the administration interface is so granular, some of the categories and some of the settings end up in really odd places. It's hard to figure out where a certain setting is sometimes. I brought up the issue to our sales guy and, from what I understand, they're working on that. But it's also something I can appreciate because it gives me the flexibility to delegate control to anyone in our organization, whether it be us, as the global administrator, or our tech support people and I only want to give them access to certain domains. I can also give control to a customer who registered a domain through us and who wants to manage their own domain. I wouldn't say it's super-intuitive, but it is granular. Also, a little bit more email that is categorized as "clean" is coming through nowadays. But with that said, it's doing a great job at blocking a lot of the more obvious, blatant spam—the newsletters and the marketing stuff that you can usually unsubscribe from. Those are the types of emails that 90 percent of people don't want. But compared to our last spam filter, it does let a little bit more email through that is categorized as "clean."

They could improve on the color of the interface.

The solution is very slow, it crashes and we have difficulties getting emails. In an upcoming release, I would like to see a cloud version of the solution.