TitanHQ SpamTitan alternatives and competitors

The solution is not hard to manage.

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.

I have been using the solution for approximately two and a half years.

We have had issues with the solution crashing, they have not been able to fix it.

We have 100 users using the solution in my company.

I have used many different types of solutions in the past such as open-sourced versions, Linux filters, AVS, Cisco, and Forcepoint.

The setup was simple.

We did the deployment and maintenance of the solution ourselves.

The price of this solution is low. When you do purchase everything is included in the licensing cost.

We are wanting to change from this solution to a different one. I would recommend spending the extra money on a good solution, it will save you from having issues later.

I rate TitanHQ SpamTitan a six out of ten.

We use Microsoft exchange for our email and this solution for anti-spam email security. 

One of the use cases is, since we migrated from G Suite to Microsoft Office 365, we were experiencing lots of unwanted emails, payload or attachments, and some phishing emails from unknown sources being sent to our company email. Previously we have experienced a lot of this type of email traffic with G Suite as well. This is the first time the company is using an anti-spam or email solution.

I have found the feature that creates seamless categorization of emails valuable. This is most likely done by having a large database to compare and to identify what are the domains that are currently spammers.

The antivirus scan engines that they have incorporated with the solution are powerful.

The inter mailbox email flow needs improvement. If you are in the same domain, it does not have the capability to transfer one email to the same domain through SpamTitan. They need an API for Office 365 which is currently being developed.

In an upcoming release, it would be beneficial to add DNS filtering or something that is capable of identifying the URLs that are harmful to a computer if it is clicked. We are currently looking for these features. However, we have been told they are currently in development and will be available this year.

I have been using this solution for approximately five years.

I have been using this solution in my previous company and they have been using it just before I left in 2018. This is the second time I recommend this solution to a company because of its reliability.

This solution only has one purpose and that is for segregating emails. There are a lot of other competitors that have offered more. We are currently looking into other vendors for these additional features.

We have approximately 1700 licensed users of Office 365 being protected by this solution.

The technical support is responsive. However, I did experience some delays and this is only due to the time difference from where I am located. They are completely straightforward when giving their support.

We use Microsoft Exchange Online in conjunction with this solution.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We are on a per-user or per-mailbox monthly subscription. We are happy with the price of the solution. When comparing it to other solutions it is much cheaper.

I have evaluated Microsoft Defender.

I would highly recommend this solution to others.

I rate TitanHQ SpamTitan a nine out of ten.

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 it to provide 100% spam protection for us as well as all of our clients. It is ultimately part of our layered security approach since not one thing can do it all. You need a lot of stuff. Therefore, they are a part of that solution.

The way that we are structured in our go-to-market strategy, this solution is part of a whole host of things. Though it is typically not the forerunner since spam is not a major forerunner, but if it is definitely a thing to be on the table, then they would be at the meetings and helping us to land deals. Security, in general, is typically something that is part of our go-to-market strategy. At that point, people want to hear about the layers of security and the fact that we have a spam filter and how that integrates with other components of monitoring their network.

Every company and person will experience spam differently because everyone interacts with accounts, emails, subscriptions, and websites much differently. From my perspective, for the five years we have been on it, I have never had a problem. I don't even know where those spam/ham buttons really are on my computer. It does exactly what I need. I don't say, "Oh. I didn't get that. Let me go check my spam." That doesn't really exist. I literally can think of one time in five years where I have said that. Then, the person sending me the email was sending a very spammy email from a mailing list type software. It was no wonder it got caught, and it was his fault. As far as the product goes, it is really good. I am sure some of our clients also don't understand how to articulate that. For them, they don't think it adds much. We do hear that noise and have to consider that as part of a product that we are going to have in our suite offering. As far as the false positives go, it is fairly solid.

In the last year, I had one company with whom we never do business. He is a painter who came to paint our office. He emailed an invoice and it went to my spam box. I texted him. I am like, "Hey, am I getting an invoice?" He was like, "I sent it." So, in a whole year, I have spent three minutes managing my spam, which is next to nothing.

SpamTitan’s geo-blocking feature helps allow us to block spam emails entering our network and servers, reducing our spam intake. We use this feature regularly because we have customers who have offices around the globe. Especially before COVID when it was safe to travel, people (from our customers) were always circumnavigating the globe. Being able to either turn it on for temporary usage or block it altogether, that versatility was a key feature that we needed. This feature is perfect for us. It gives us everything we need. Everything has been versatile enough for us in terms of allowing exceptions based on trusted vendors' ID, IP, domain, or email address.

I would rate the overall intuitiveness as eight out of 10. It is not that bad. There are just a few things. I don't know if it is a limitation of Microsoft or just a limitation of the design. There is a spam/ham button that they have. I love it, but it is not necessarily as intuitive. It is a bit tongue-in-cheek as far as a marketing ploy of good versus bad: fake being spam and good being ham. Most people who are already super self-conscious about their computers, knowledge, and skillset, they don't know what that means. To me, I love it. I think it is hilarious and clever, but I don't think it is that great for the intuitiveness of people who don't use it regularly. Those menus and options are buried in the ribbon on a separate add-in feature page versus where McAfee and other solutions used to bolt in right on your main email page. Anytime that you need to click two or three times to do something, that is always a pain in the ass. It would be nice if they had something where you could click right away in front of you and the buttons would be, "Mark as spam. Mark as good." Or, something like that, but it is their business decision.

The overall GUI is utilitarian. It has a spreadsheet feel versus a nice software that is guided. I am sure they're going to improve it over time. It could look a little prettier. It needs some lipstick. They should get rid of unfamiliar words like ham and spam, helping the user to better understand what they are clicking through.

For the couple of clients who have those unique needs that don't do business the way we do or have emails as clean as us, we have just turned off the actual spam quarantine boxes. I am finding that we are starting to do that more often, where the mail will just get forwarded through to junk with a subject line like, "***Spam****," and then the message. Having it quarantined and held in their online part makes it very tough to go check right away. You need to do multiple clicks plus sign-in. No one remembers their sign-in accounts. You need to go find an old email, which is just not great. 

If I want quarantine reports sent to me, then I get them all at 3:00 AM. As opposed to getting one sent to me every hour, then I can go check if there is something rather than delivering the malicious emails or spam. That would be something of improvement. It is just a better way to fine-tune or dial-in on reports.

Thousands of our customers really don't like the reports. They can't fine-tune or adjust when they get delivered. They have a lot of spam senders, e.g., newsletters, where they are expecting whomever they are dealing with to send them invoices, quotes, etc. This creates a whole bunch of flags of why it would be counted as spam. Logically, it all makes sense. They are not going to go buy a new ERP system for something like that. However, our customer is now super frustrated because they are now getting penalties on late payments or different things because the invoice went to their spam box.

It is easy to white label, but the damage was already done because they went and got a new vendor. They already did something else without us knowing, so there is no way to know that we have to white label it. We hear quite a bit of noise from our customers as far as just how they have to interact and manage spam.

We have been using it for more than five years.

The stability has been the same versus other security solutions that we have used. The solution is always, but so were the other solutions that I previously used.

Their services are awesome so we don't have a lot of problems with spam and viruses plaguing our customers. However, if and when something happens, they are phenomenal with their support who help and get involved. They don't make it our problem. I don't think they have ever said, "No," to us for anything.

Their tech support is awesome. When I was directly working with the techs, I would often reference SpamTitan's support as a way to parallel or mirror some of the things that we were trying to strengthen in our own support. I would rate them as nine out of 10 since there is always room for improvement.

I only hear about when things are not going very well or meeting our expected SLAs. I hear about other vendors, and it is like, "They suck. They never get back to us." I get the customer complaints about certain things, Microsoft being one of them, where things are not getting fixed and we are waiting on the vendor. Then, I have to get involved and talk to clients, give credits, etc. because Microsoft is taking forever. 

From my perspective, I know that SpamTitan has never been a problem for us or had those types of escalations. Therefore, they are performing very well.

Our tickets are usually done within an hour or less. This means we can work with the customer, reach out to a vendor, get support, and help the customer all within 60 minutes.

Positive

We first came to the solution because of an amazing sales guy named Marc Ludden at SpamTitan. I met him a long time ago. Since then, he has been promoted two or three times. I met him at a conference and we were just talking about their spam solution versus what we were currently doing. His charismatic approach and upfront promises of how things would be better seemed intriguing. For the price point, we were like, "Well, if this is even remotely close to what he is offering for this price, it is worth the risk to try them out." It was a bit of a, "Let's give this a go," and they have never let us down and we have never looked back.

Its savings for quality and service are hands-down the number one reason that we switched. I don't feel we have compromised any quality or service for our spam product. We went from using Barracuda, AppRiver, and McAfee. With TitanHQ's personable approach and boutique customer care, that is where we see a huge difference.

It is a very simple tool. Some of those other solutions are very complicated and convoluted to manage. Whereas, this is very simple and easy. It has afforded us a margin when it comes to, not just money, but the actual ability to manage a network through projects or disasters. 

The setup and configuration were super easy. Even if it was "difficult" as far as the complexity of what needed to get done, they helped. 

When you are new, they hold your hand as long and as much as you want. They did our first few deployments, then we finally said, "You know what? I think we have got this," and we started to tell them that we won't call them for deployments anymore, but they are always there to help and still are to this day. Even though we are not new, and every time we call them, there is never a thing they won't do for us.

Our pricing has pretty much stayed somewhat the same. Sure, there has been an increase or two that keeps up with inflation, but that is everybody. When we switched from AppRiver to SpamTitan, we saved about 20%. That is $1,000 to $2,000 a month. We went to SpamTitan and WebTitan. It was $1,000 savings a month for SpamTitan and another $1,500 a month savings for WebTitan.

Their superior service comes at a very cost-effective price. This is the biggest part that really allows us to remain competitive. Their pricing for us has just been great. They have helped us to be where we need to be. They really do partner with us in that way so we can get more business. They provide the right pricing, which lets us remain competitive. 

We have tried and tested Microsoft O365 spam filters, just native without any third-party, as well as the Clutter box. That was a nightmare. There is definitely a reason why third-party spam providers exist versus just using what is built into O365. SpamTitan is one of those reasons.

Customers almost don't care which spam filter it is. Almost, because it sometimes does come up, and they will say, "Who are you using?" However, we typically don't even get, "Who are you using?" Usually, if that person is technical at that other organization, that is when they're just curious. Typically, people don't even ask us what type of tools we are bringing. They just want the end result recipe of a calm network.

The geo-blocking feature is important for us. Though, it is hard to always get it perfect. That is for any provider with geofencing because you don't always get control over where Internet traffic flows from or through, or where they are running from. IPs are a little bit better, but we don't always know what hotel people are in.

They are very good. I would rate them as 10 out of 10 because there is always room for improvement.

Within our company, M&M Golf Cars, there are three companies under us, with everything from sales to marketing to customer interaction, both inbound and outbound. Anytime that we receive any type of email, it gets filtered through SpamTitan. 

The way that we have it set up is to filter on keywords. If something looks like it was written by a human, it will allow it to pass through, unless it throws some kind of flag that something looks suspicious. In general, it simply routes emails to our employees, giving us warnings if there is anything suspicious that we need to know about, before those emails actually are received.

We use the cloud version of the solution, we don't have an onsite server. We have multiple companies within my company, but we've set them all up to route through SpamTitan.

We started with SpamTitan a couple of months after I started with this company. Up until then, we didn't have a spam filter solution. All the junk marketing emails would make it to every single person's inbox. People were having to filter through all the junk while also trying to find and respond to emails from customers in a decent amount of time. They were getting more spam and fake emails with malicious attachments than actual customer emails. The amount of time that everybody was spending just deleting junk and trying to actually find customer emails was excessive.

Since starting with SpamTitan, though, we hardly ever have any emails that are malicious or that are from random domains that are known to be used for spam. And anything that does come through that it thinks is malicious, but it's not 100 percent sure, will be placed in quarantine for each user. It will give them a daily, automatic report saying, "We have these in a quarantine. If they look good to you, you can release them, and you'll immediately get them in your inbox."

As a result, not do we not have to delete all the spam from our inboxes. It allows us to only see the most important ones that are questionable, so we're not digging through hundreds of emails a day from junk addresses. In comparison to before we got SpamTitan to now, two and a half years after getting it, hours a week are saved for every single employee because they don't have to dig through junk. At the end of 2021, when I ran our yearly report, it had automatically blocked over 250,000 bad emails that weren't from customers or had malicious attachments.

If we saved, say, 30 seconds for every one of those 250,000 emails that were stopped, we saved that much time, minimum. And our inboxes don't reach capacity from the junk that should have never reached us to begin with. As a company, we've saved so much money by not having to spend the time to deal with that stuff, because of SpamTitan.

The geo-blocking feature definitely reduces our spam intake. The last time that I checked just geo-IP blocking, we had about 2,000 emails that attempted to come through in the last six months and were immediately stopped because we obviously don't do business with them or have any connections with them.

The filter rules are valuable. The software itself will automatically filter out things that it thinks are suspicious. However, the filter rules are the most helpful because, if we need to, we can block entire domains and subdomains with the click of a button. In addition, if one specific email address is a problem, but not the entire domain, we can drill down and specifically block it without affecting anyone else in that domain.

They also have something called Pattern Filtering, which has been a godsend. While the software can only do so much, as far as detecting things that look suspicious based on what it's seen from all of its users, with Pattern Filtering I can use my own terminology or search terms. For example, if I don't want any email to ever come through that has the term "hot dog" in it, whether it be in the subject, the title, or anywhere else, I can immediately block such emails, company-wide. That has saved me so much time. It also works for blocking specific document types or file types. All it takes on my end is going into the Pattern Filtering and selecting what I don't want to come through or what I want to go into quarantine, to warn me first before we allow it through. It's one of the most helpful, but also one of the easiest-to-use features, that does the most for our company. It has saved me hours of work a month when it comes to filtering out all the new stuff that keeps coming in from different countries and scammers.

When we started, geo-blocking wasn't a feature but they added it within the last year. I also do a lot of network security for our company. If there is a specific country that we don't do business with and from which we're getting a lot of requests, or if we have multiple attacks coming in a specific country, or if we keep getting a lot of emails from the same IP subnet from a certain country, instead of having to block every single new IP that comes in from that country, I can literally just block the country and any IP that tries to send us mail is immediately stopped, which is fantastic.

Those features are the ones we use the most, and they're also the most helpful for filtering out the most junk. And a lot of that is done automatically, once it starts detecting our blocking patterns and the stuff we aren't allowing to come through. With the subset of those things that do actually get through, because the senders either found better ways to mask what they're trying to do or they're sending stuff from different IPs that weren't blocked originally, I can just go into the solution and block them. Including login time and getting to the screen, I could have an IP address or an entire country blocked in less than two minutes.

In addition, the UI is not extremely flashy, which is fine for the people who need to be in the online console and determine what gets blocked and what gets released. It's very straightforward without animations or graphics. It has tabs that you click on that say, "If you click here, this is what you're dealing with." The usability is fantastic. It doesn't give me more than I need so that I have to drill down through 20 different windows before I get to what I want. I actually appreciate the fact that it's as simple as it is.

Another good feature is that you can see how much is being blocked based on date ranges.

The only thing that threw me off a little bit, when it first came out, was the Pattern Filtering. There didn't seem to be a huge amount of documentation on how to properly use it. If you want to block the term "hot dog," it's pretty straightforward. You just select, "if the email contains this phrase, block it for everyone." 

But, if you want to block an email address with .com.biz, which seems like it's legit but that .biz at the end throws it off, you have to get a little more detailed regarding how you type out what the Pattern Filtering looks for. You can't just enter ".com.biz" because it will then block everything that has .com or .biz in it. It takes a little more regex coding.

If they had a little more documentation explaining how to use regex, or if they could include that inside of the cloud interface so that it generates regex code based on the parameters you input, that would be a lot more useful for people who aren't familiar with coding languages and HTML. When you use it for a while, you get used to it, and you understand what it is that the pattern filter is looking for, but a regular user who doesn't know anything about regex has to learn a type of coding before they're able to successfully use that filter properly.

I have been using TitanHQ SpamTitan for two and a half years.

I have never once had an issue where the software went down or stopped routing our emails. There has never once been an occasion where TitanHQ has said, "We're going to do maintenance," or "We're not going to be able to route your emails." In two and a half years, it's never stopped working once, not even for five minutes. It's one of the most stable solutions that we use, company-wide.

Scaling is extremely simple. When we started, they asked us how many users we would have. SpamTitan detects whether we are under that number of users. But it has never stopped us. We once went over the number of licensed users. We talked to them and said, "We added new employees, we need to up our license," and they did that instantly. There was no waiting and we didn't have to go through renewing the contract. We didn't have to change any settings and we didn't have to reroute anything again. They added more users and it just kept working. Scaling is super-easy, and the solution can accommodate as many people as you need.

With all of our sub-companies, we have about 150 users of the solution.

We use it literally every day for filtering everything. The cool thing about it is that once it's set up and it's running the way you need it to, you hardly even need to log in, unless somebody tried to send an email and it didn't show up immediately. If that email didn't hit the spam filter, then you just have to tell whoever sent the email to try again. Other than that, it just works.

In the future, if we open more locations or we hire new employees, we'll absolutely increase how many users are using the software because it's invaluable to us.

I come from an MSP background. I took over the director of IT role in this company when I started here. With companies that I used in the past, if there was an issue with something that was not set up right or it was not filtering correctly, you would have to either submit a ticket or call. You would wait on hold and hope that the rep who talks to you is either knowledgeable enough to help you or wait again to be transferred to tier-one, two, or three support, until somebody was able to solve the problem.

The best thing about support with SpamTitan is that if I have an issue and I email them, I will normally get a response in 30 minutes if it's not a serious problem. But if I call them—and I have never had a company do this before—I always seem to talk to the same people; not the team, but literally the same people every time. If I had a problem a couple months ago, and then I have a new problem, I'm talking to the same person that I spoke with months ago, and they're familiar with what's happened in the past and they remember my setup. It seems like the most personalized software support that I've ever experienced. I'm not constantly worried that I'm going to have somebody who isn't able to help me when I call. With TitanHQ, the person I call and talk to is the person that is solving my problem, every single time.

It honestly feels like the people who are helping me either use the software themselves, and have from the beginning, or they helped engineer and develop the software. They're able to fix my problem in minutes, versus several phone calls or having to worry about getting transferred around. That's awesome.

Positive

In a previous job, the company I worked for used Barracuda. That was an onsite spam filtering service. It was fine, although it took a lot more setup and a lot more hands-on work to get it working the way that I needed it to. And if there was ever a problem, either with the hardware or software updates, I would have to call somebody in support who knows what they're doing, or wait for somebody that does to give me a callback and help me fix the problem. In a business, when you have people sending you contracts or sales orders and invoices and there's a problem that is stopping email from coming through, if you can't get help immediately and you lose those emails, it really hurts your company. I had issues like that with Barracuda.

Before Barracuda, we had something that was used to help filter spam and has since become Cisco hardware. It almost feels like the companies were too big to give customers personalized support when they needed it. It was as if they had grown beyond what their support teams could handle. With SpamTitan, I've never once gotten the feeling that they're taking on more than they can handle.

We looked at Barracuda and Cisco and went through a few demos. Believe it or not, we actually found SpamTitan through Reddit, via several IT channels that I was a member of. Somebody from TitanHQ answered a lot of my questions through Reddit and offered us a demo. We did the demo and it did everything we needed it to do, without a ton of input from us or having to spend days to get it set up and working. The fact that it worked, out-of-the-box, meant we went directly from the demo to signing on with the company. We've loved it ever since.

The setup for the demos that we had tried to do before SpamTitan was insane. We did less to get everything working with SpamTitan than we did with all of these other companies' spam filtering demos. Demos are supposed to be easy and attract customers. You want to show people that your stuff works with the easiest onboarding possible. The only company that was able to do that and show us that their stuff worked without a headache in setting it all up was SpamTitan. And that's why we stuck with them.

It's one of the easiest setups that we've ever done. We just set our mail to route through SpamTitan and it auto-detected our email addresses. That's all it took. The software took care of everything else for us. There was no complicated setup. Our domain goes through the solution first. It detects the users that we have, sets them all up separately, and filters from there. We set up how strict we wanted it to be and let it learn over the first month. We manage everything through their website.

From the time that we were told to change where our mail is routed to, until it was actually successfully routing our emails to SpamTitan, it took about five minutes to set up.

Because we were unfamiliar with the software, we waited until our company was closed, and we weren't expecting any emails, to implement it. We did it on a weekend when we don't get a lot of customer emails. I spoke with somebody from SpamTitan and they told me where I needed to change our routing to. We logged into our domain, changed our MX record to route to SpamTitan, and everything else just took care of itself after that.

When we first started, there was a test mode and it would ask me, as the administrator, what was okay to let through. It would learn, based on my preferences, what it is that we were looking to block. After that first month of using SpamTitan, we now get a maximum of three false positives, company-wide, a week. Most of the time, the ones that get caught in the quarantine but that should have come through have a PDF attached or something has a really sketchy name, like a bunch of numbers, or it has "exe", even if it's not a .exe file but has the word "executive". But it lets us know that it was flagged so that way we have the ability to release it.

Not having to completely recover the company from a malware attack or from something that came in through email, and not having to worry about employees clicking on malicious links, are themselves, aspects of a return on investment. One malicious email with a bad attachment, or with a link that leads to a bad attachment, is enough to take an entire network down. 

Also, the fact that our firewall hasn't been working as hard since we got the spam filter, speaks for itself regarding how valuable the software is. 

If one software implementation can stop 90 percent of the problems in a company, when it comes to malware and malicious actors; if it can do that much and take the workload off of everything else in the company, then it's worth it a million times over.

And the time that we all save not having to dig through all the junk or worrying about whether we are going to click on something we shouldn't click on allows all of us to focus more on our actual tasks. We don't have to devote so much of our day to digging through and deleting junk emails, just to get to the stuff we actually need to do our jobs. That is also return on our investment. The amount of time SpamTitan has saved us is definitely worth it.

When we started with this company they had fewer features. Neither the geo-IP blocking was available, nor was the Pattern Blocking. But throughout the two and a half years that we've been with them, they've added them, and they have not increased our cost. They've not even asked us to sign on for additional features. They just added them to their product and they were available for us to use. Having the same costs that we've been paying and having new features added is awesome. They give you an update without charging you more for it. I like that a lot. It makes you feel appreciated as a customer.

If you're considering SpamTitan, get a feel for the software during the demo that they offer. If there is anything that you're not 100 percent certain about in terms of how it works or what its function is, call the support people and they'll explain it to you and make sure that you understand what it's supposed to do and how it works. That will let you know that the support people are there to help you, but it also makes sure that you understand the software that you're considering paying for. The demo will show you how much their software is actually able to do, while asking questions of their support staff will also show you how attentive and personal the support is. That way, you're getting the most out of determining if you want to actually use the software.

Lean on the support staff, because that's what they're there for. They will let you know that if you need anything, they're always there to help, no matter how small or big the question or problem might be.

The biggest lesson I've learned from using the solution is that I should have gotten it a lot sooner. The sooner you use the solution, the more time you'll have for everything else in your company.

Given all the spam filters that I've used, this is by far the easiest to use and the most detailed. At least give it a try, before you make a decision.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have been using it for about six months.

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

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

We are monitoring around 20 mailboxes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our primary use case is filtering incoming emails.

SpamTitan is a product that saves us time. The less spam that you have, the more time you have because you're not digging through the mail that hits your inbox. The other thing is that it blocks potential trojans, viruses, and phishing attempts. This means that IT has less to deal with in case something does get through and opened, resulting in an infection.

On the front end, the user community doesn't have nearly as much email to deal with, in particular, spam messages. On the back end for IT, it's a huge time saver because we're not infecting our network with malware.

Before we got SpamTitan, the amount of time spent dealing with unwanted emails depended on the user. People that were dealing with a lot of outside entities would receive more spam because their email address is out there. Depending on the user, they might have three or four spam messages, or somebody might have between 20 and 30 to deal with.

For people on the higher end, with 20 or 30 spam messages that are hitting their inbox, it's time-consuming to go through and determine whether something is valid or invalid. In some cases, an email says it's coming from within the company, perhaps somebody in our purchasing department. When another employee sees the name, they assume it's safe but in reality, it's a spoofed email address. People often don't feel like digging into it so they just look at the email, resulting in the introduction of a trojan, virus, or other malware.

The amount of time that it takes to deal with spam messages varies. It depends on the type of spam that is hitting the inbox. In the morning when you fire up your email program, a high-end user may spend 15 to 20 minutes going through stuff just to make sure it's valid or not valid.

Then, throughout the day, these people were getting spam messages. It eats your time, even with one or two here and there, because you're taking time to maybe open the message, then investigate if it's really coming from a valid address or not. Even if it only takes a minute to do one message, and you get 15 of those a day, that's 15 minutes of your time. That's quite valuable.

We have thousands of users so even if 2,000 of them get five spam messages a day, and it takes each one a minute to deal with, it's a lot of time.

Using SpamTitan has immensely improved our spam catch rate and reduced our false positive rate. In a five-year timeframe, it has blocked between 60 million and 70 million messages. 

The most valuable feature is the protection that it offers against spam, phishing, viruses, and other such attacks. That's the biggest benefit of the product.

We use the geo-blocking feature, which helps to reduce our spam intake. There are known locations that are notorious for sending spam, viruses, and so forth, which is one of the reasons we use it. Right now, our filter is blocking approximately 75% of the mail that hits our door. Only 26% of the mail we get actually passes.

We use the geo-blocking feature for restricting emails based on country, and it works well. However, if something does pass that is spam or a phishing attempt, then we may block by IP address if necessary. This is very important to our organization because spam email is bad, and it's a problem for us.

We are able to create exceptions based on a trusted sender's specific location or IP address, and it works fine for that. We don't have a large rule base and in most cases, the senders, who are typically customers or vendors that we deal with, do not have their email exchange set up properly. They don't have the proper checks in place, so we add exceptions for them.

The user interface is good, and it's pretty easy to use once you learn your way around. That said, there's a lot to it and it's in-depth. There are many aspects to the interface, and there are a lot of tabs.

Overall, in terms of the system's intuitiveness, it's okay. When you click on a tab for system settings, as an example, there are multiple tabs that you can drill down into from there. Sometimes, it can be a little bit difficult to find out where you want to go, just because there are many layers to the interface.

It is difficult to say how I might improve it. There are many pieces to it, and a lot of layers, but the way they have it set up is fine. Sometimes, however, you have to search around a little bit to find out where you want to go.

There are eight main tabs and once you click on one of those tabs, it takes you into another area where there can be up to eight or ten other things that you can click into. Then, when you get in there, it might be another six or eight areas that you can look at.

If you go into system setup, as an example, and then go to static routing for network configuration, that's three layers deep. You would probably figure that the network configuration is going to be in the system setup, so you would start there intuitively, but it's a lot of options.

One of the areas that can be improved is the GUI. The product works well but finding things in the interface can sometimes be a bit difficult, just because it's so in-depth and covers a lot.

We have been using TitanHQ SpamTitan for approximately five years.

This is a very stable product. We have not had any downtime and we have not had the product crash on us, where it was not filtering mail.

We have not rebooted our server for five years.

SpamTitan is easily scalable. If you give them more money, they'll give you more licenses.

We are a large company with many factories in Mexico, China, Vietnam, and several US cities. We have several thousand employees and in the past five years of using SpamTitan, we have blocked between 60 million and 70 million messages.

We have 100% adoption. Any email coming into our company has to go through this filter before it hits our Exchange server and then is distributed to the user community. 

The technical support is really good. I've had great luck with the support group out of Titan HQ. They are quick to respond and typically have a solution very quickly. If they don't, they'll dig into it and keep updating you as to where they're at in the process of finding a solution. Overall, I'm pleased with the support.

I would rate their support a nine out of ten. It's not a perfect rating because there is always that time when you don't get the exact answer you want, or they can't do exactly what you want. In any case, that could be a software update or something that has to be reprogrammed. They will send that up to development, but sometimes it takes time for that to happen.

If comparing support to other vendors, their response time is very quick. When you open a ticket, you get a response right away that they acknowledge that you've submitted a help desk ticket with them. Then typically you'll get a response from the tech at Titan HQ that has picked up the ticket.

They'll let you know either right then about a solution, or that they're investigating. Typically you will hear back, I would say normally within the hour, with a solution, or potential questions to help with a solution.

I would rate them above average as far as their response time and working through issues.

Positive

Prior to using SpamTitan, we were using the filtering that is part of our Microsoft Exchange.

It's quite easy to set up. There are a lot of defaults that are set up in how it functions and what it does. Then, as you start using the product more, you can get more in-depth and put more controls and filters in place. As far as initially setting it up, the process is pretty easy.

Having it easy to set up is always an important thing. The less time you have to spend configuring and setting up a product, the more time you have for doing other things.

From start to finish, we spent approximately one day getting it set up. The server was installed, the software was installed, and then we set up getting our mail routed through it.

After the initial setup, there is some programming and other things that you do over time. But, I wouldn't consider that as part of the installation process.

We did the implementation ourselves, with the help of Titan HQ. Our experience with them has been good. The products that they sell are typically good and easy to use, so you'll potentially put them into other locations or buy more licenses.

The deployment can be done with one person, and we have a couple of people on staff that take care of it. If there are issues with false positives or things of that nature, we've got a couple of people on staff that oversee it. That's not their only job; they're network administrators or systems admins and they have multiple tasks. That said, they have a couple of people that are familiar with the product and work on it.

Pricing is on par with other products, and it's reasonable. They have different categories as far as the size of your company and how they license it, which is good.

We evaluated three or four products at the time, although it was several years ago and I don't recall exactly which ones.

We preferred SpamTitan after looking at other customer reviews, talking with some references, and they just came out the winner as far as capabilities. Support is a big thing for anybody when it comes to dealing with a product, and it's important because you're potentially blocking viruses and other malware that could harm the company very badly.

My advice for anybody who is looking into implementing this product is to first go through their demo with them and make sure you understand how in-depth the product is because there's a lot to it. If the end-user wants a product that they plug in and turn on and they never have to look at it again, SpamTitan is not it.

This is an in-depth product and there are multiple ways to block things, although it is fairly plug-and-play with their default configuration. Other than just the actual configuration of IP addresses and things of that nature, there's a lot to it.

I know there are simpler options out there, but they also are not as comprehensive as what you can do with the product.

Overall, as far as the product goes and how it catches things, I'm quite happy with it. Ninety percent of the time, it does a great job. There is that 10% that sometimes you may want to try and do something with it, and it doesn't have the capability. That is pretty rare and when it happens, typically they will send that to development, and development will come up with a solution.

It may take a little time for them because I'm sure they have a huge backlog of things, but it's not like they tell you it's something they're not going to do. Instead, they'll send it to the development team and explain that there is an issue that the customer wants to be corrected or a capability that they want to have added. At that point, it will go up the chain within their organization.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We've been using SpamTitan for around four months. 

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

I rate SpamTitan 10 out of 10. 

The geo-blocking is doing a very good job. I look at our SIEM to see from which countries we're getting attempted logins through Office 365. I started to correlate that with places we were getting spam from, like Brazil. We were also getting a fair amount of stuff coming in from the usual suspects, like China and North Korea. But Brazil was unexpected. I never would have guessed that there's a large hacking community down there, or machines there that are owned by hackers in other countries. The geo-blocking is important for reducing the exposure that we have.

For example, we can geo-block something and then we don't have to inspect a blocked email for a virus. Before we enabled geo-blocking, we were getting embedded viruses, and it was catching those, but now that's being caught by the geo-blocking feature.

Because our end-users are not getting spam, I'm not getting messages where people say, "I think this is spam. What do you think?" I used to get something like that six or eight times a day, so SpamTitan has definitely helped save time.

And in comparison to our previous solution from Barracuda, SpamTitan has reduced our spam by a factor of three.

I'd read that the portal software was dated from the UI perspective, but when I use it, it is very logically laid out. That is one of the things I like. I'm able to get to what I need to very quickly and manage it efficiently. Once I understood the model of how they were doing things, it was very easy to work with.

In addition, I looked at the reporting and about one-third of things that come are not spam, but they are blocked and they need to be blocked because of our rule sets. They're failing DMARC; SPF records are nonexistent. Another valuable feature is "nonexistent recipient." That eliminates a lot of noise that we would get, such as things coming in for former employees. We just don't need that mail.

The training for end-users could be improved. I would like to see a video that says, "Here's the solution and what it will look like." It would be helpful if they had something like that to set expectations.

For example, some of our end-users would go in and delete a message through the solution but they didn't know there was a popup that was part of that process. They weren't allowing popups. And then they couldn't understand why the message they had deleted was still in their mailbox when they knew that they had deleted it.

There was a disconnect regarding how things function, so they need something to show the end-user, very simply, what to expect and how you do things. They have it documented in text and with screenshots, and we went through that, but these days all of our training is done with short, three-minute videos, and people prefer that. They're not going to read anything.

We've been using TitanHQ SpamTitan in earnest for 60 to 90 days. We were testing it for about three months before that.

The stability is good. 

My concern is about what would happen if it goes down. Is it load-balanced? Is there a cluster on the other end or is this just one single server? As a mortgage bank, email is critical and everything is time-sensitive. If that's an option, or it's something that is built-in, I'm not aware of it.

From what I'm looking at, it's probably a single server having fault tolerance with two nodes. I come from regional banks and international companies and we always have multiples for failover. We're a small company and I don't know that we could afford that kind of redundancy, but I haven't had a discussion with TitanHQ about what that would look like or what it would cost. I could bring that to our executives and say, "Is this something that would be valuable given the cost?" If they were to say no, and then we had an outage, it could get expensive on our end.

The support hours are tough for U.S.-based companies like ours, because they're in Europe. They did tell me that they're opening a support office in the U.S. There is, currently, some overlap in support, but it's difficult to get real-time support and, a lot of the time, I just need a quick answer.

That could be improved. It's not an untenable situation but it is a little bit frustrating when I've got users saying, "Hey, I need this or that," and I really need to know how to configure it.

When I do get somebody in support, they're on top of it and they do a great job, but sometimes there's a delay in getting a response.

I had to become familiar with all the different features, and how they classified things a little bit differently. But they do a good job on the help desk side of it. We had a couple of issues where the documentation wasn't there and they agreed. Two days later I was on their help site and I saw that they had built a more specific page for that. It was really encouraging that they're on top of it.

The quality of the support is great. The people I've worked with are great. It's the timeliness. Sometimes it takes a little while, going back and forth, to get the right person.

For Barracuda support we went through a service provider and it typically took a day or two before we would get a response, so SpamTitan is much better.

But compared to other companies, SpamTitan is on par with what we would get from Microsoft or Cisco, given that we are a regional bank and a larger account. With those companies, I can usually get a hold of somebody on the phone within an hour to four hours. With SpamTitan, it is mostly through email, back and forth. That means there are some delays. Sometimes, being able to talk to somebody and just say what I need to do would be better than doing it through emails.

The best support I've ever gotten, as a reference point, has been from Nutanix. That might be a model that they want to look at. I got better support from Nutanix on products that weren't even theirs. I had problems with VMware and their engineers helped solve the problem, which really engendered my confidence in their product.

Positive

Our company has been doing managed service for 10 years with two different service providers. My job was to come in and stand up an internal IT department because they weren't happy with the services. I've been in IT for over 40 years and I typically fulfill a CTO role and help companies get their IT functioning during a major merger or acquisition. My current company is constantly in a merger and acquisition phase.

I looked at the products that our company was using but, because there was no IT department, we weren't really getting value out of those products. In all fairness, the products weren't configured optimally for this company. I said, "Well, this is an opportunity to look at something more cost-effective."

We landed on TitanHQ's SpamTitan.

We were using Barracuda, which is not a bad product. But we weren't set up with any portals so I couldn't see anything. We were getting an inordinate amount of spam and targeted spam. I was just unhappy with the company overall. I decided I had to put my own stuff in and just forklift everything else out.

Overall, the setup was very good. 

The exception was creating the proper certificate. We couldn't get it working properly. So SpamTitan created the certificate but it doesn't function properly because we still get an error message that people have to bypass. This is part of what I was talking about with the end-users getting a popup. It's like when you go to a webpage and the certificate is out of date. Our end-users are getting that error message because the certificate doesn't function properly. They thought the site was broken and I said, "No, you can bypass it. We trust this site. This is 'our site.'"

This issue with their certificate has caused a lot more communication between my team and the end-users where we have to say, "No, really, this is okay," because in general, we've trained them to not bypass messages like that. In this particular case, we know it's something we have to fix. That part of it wasn't clear in the documentation.

I've got a call tomorrow with the SpamTitan support team and I'll talk to them about getting this fixed because it is the only problem that we have right now.

When I talked to Barracuda from the licensing perspective, it was not as competitive as what I would have liked. We're a smaller company with about 130 employees.

Also, in a meeting with my senior management, they said that my prediction that we were going to get more spam temporarily until the SpamTitan machine learning had completed was true, but they also said they thought it was going to take much longer. Within about a week, things had settled down and they said we are getting a lot less spam than we used to with our previous solution.  

We still have SpamTitan in learning mode and one of the things that I did at the beginning was to log in every day and look at all the email. When something was obviously spam I took care of it in the back end so that end-users don't have to deal with it. This week, when I looked at it, I didn't see anything that I needed to take action on. It's doing a very good job of properly identifying things.

At first, my senior management were apprehensive about SpamTitan, but now they are saying that they feel they are in control of spam. The way SpamTitan works is a little bit different because, with Barracuda, they were getting hourly updates about quarantined mail. When I told them they were only going to get updates once a day, but they could go check, they thought that was going to be more impactful, but for most people it has resulted in less noise. Our end-users are comfortable with it and it's working really well.

In our business, we get bulk notifications from different companies about the current interest rates, sometimes two or three times a day from the same company, and they go to 20 or 30 or more recipients who are our loan officers. Our end-users like that they can go into the quarantine and clear those. After a while, they'll either create a folder for those updates or they'll just say, "I don't need this anymore and I'm going to block it." They like the fact that they're all managing that independently. That's not to say they couldn't do so with Barracuda, but it required logging into a portal and knowing how to sort things. Now, it's in an email and, right from that email, they can block or allow those  messages independently.

A few people in our organization didn't like it, but I said, "Look, you can just open this email and click a button and, within about 30 seconds, you'll have an email that says, "This is everything that's currently in quarantine." It's easier than having to use a browser, log in to a portal, and do that. That saves them a little time.

Overall, SpamTitan learned faster than I thought it was going to, based on other products that I've used. There was a lot more feedback. The other products are based on the users, but this one, with its AI, seems to produce tremendous improvements day-to-day. I told the teams it was going to take two to three weeks but, within a week, we had dropped the amount of spam that was getting through. By Tuesday of the following week, meaning about a week and a half after implementation, it was mature. It wasn't final—it's always going to be learning—but it was mature enough that we felt that the hand holding with the individuals and checking in were not things we needed to do anymore. Everybody was confident at that point.

Don't discount TitanHQ because you haven't heard of them. I sit with other CISOs.  We get together for dinner once a month and talk and I mentioned it but nobody had heard of them. I said, "SpamTitan has this and this feature," and I delved into some of the reasons we went with it and they were taking notes. They're excited to look at something recommended by a peer who is saying, "I've used multiple products and I like the way that these guys work. I like what they're doing and how we're stacking up our security." 

TitanHQ recently acquired Cyber Risk Aware for security awareness training with phishing simulation. I mentioned that it makes sense because you could tie that into your SpamTitan and WebTitan. Your training could be based upon real metrics, in real-time, based on what people are doing. That's a very good, competitive place to be. I look forward to their growth. When I mentioned those things my colleagues were saying, "Wow, this sounds like a company we need to really seriously take a look at."

My approach is to leverage things that make sense, not because they're there. I always look at: Why? Where are we going? How do we get there? Then we can decide whether that's the right type of product or service to use going forward. We have different outcomes than we would get if we did what most people do. They say, "Well, how do we improve what we've got?" Maybe what you have doesn't fit anymore.

We also use TitanHQ's WebTitan. We just rolled that out to replace Cisco Umbrella and because the interface is very similar to SpamTitan's interface, it was very easy to roll that forward and to manage it.

So far, SpamTitan is the easiest and most efficient solution I've used. I give it a 10 out of 10.

We use it to protect our emails from spam, malware, viruses, as well as from attacks like spoofing.

We have seen a reduction in complaints from employees about spam, for sure.

Geo-blocking is a great feature. We like it. Every spam solution should have that kind of filtering. We don't work with African or Asian countries. We're mostly focused on North America. Blocking those regions helps a lot in protecting us from spammers who are trying to reach us. Before we implemented this feature, we saw a lot of spam coming from Vietnam, Russia, China, and India, et cetera. The geo-blocking has reduced spam a lot.

Another good feature, related to geo-blocking, is the ability to specify exemptions. We discovered that some of our customers, even though they are located in Canada, have an Exchange Server sitting in Japan or in the Netherlands. It seems they have branches or their head office in other countries. Having this exception feature is helpful.

The SpamTitan user interface is pretty straightforward. I don't see it as very complicated or difficult to navigate. It's very user-friendly. 

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.

We have been using TitanHQ SpamTitan since 2018.

At first, we had an issue with the emails getting stuck in SpamTitan and getting old there. The emails were in a queue and didn't go out. It was a one-time issue but when I contacted support they fixed the issue and it has been working fine since then.

One thing that concerns me is that when they need to upgrade the version or the hardware, even though it's virtual machines, the unit becomes unavailable and during these kinds of maintenance, all emails stop. Other solutions have redundancy and, even as they do maintenance, it does not affect email at all.

The scalability is good. We purchased 500 licenses and then we increased the numbers because our company grew. If our company grows more, we'll add more licenses.

Their technical support is very responsible but, because of different time zone, sometimes the response is late. In the past, their response was slower but in the last year it has been much faster.

Their expertise is very good. The technical knowledge of SpamTitan's support is better than FortiClient's, for sure.

Maybe it's just the Canadian in me, but I would like it if SpamTitan's support were a little bit more friendly. They know their stuff but sometimes you feel they're not friendly. It's not all of them, but some.

Positive

We used to use FortiClient and Symantec Messaging Gateway. We didn't like Symantec's solution, but we switched because of the cost. SpamTitan was more cost-effective than either of the other solutions.

The difficulty level of the setup process is medium. You spend time understanding how it's set up and how it's configured. The hard part was understanding how we were going to switch to it and how we were going to: add the white lists and the black lists, do exceptions by IP and by domain. There are many things you need to consider.

It didn't take long to deploy. We did it really fast, within about a week. We prepared everything and then we switched one company and then another one.

When switching from one spam filter to another, you need to make sure the move goes smoothly. You run two spam filters at the same time and migrate everything.

There were a lot of false positives in the beginning. We had to tune it and manage and create exceptions. It was time-consuming to adjust everything and white-list a lot of things. It's better now but it's still catching some false positives.

We tried a few other solutions before, including FortiClient and, before I chose SpamTitan, I looked at many reviews online. One of the online suggestions I read was for SpamTitan because it does its job and it's a cost-effective solution compared to other products, like Barracuda and FortiMail. Also, the false positive rate in FortiMail was worse.

SpamTitan may not be one of the top products on the market but I think it's good enough, at least for us.

We use it for spam filtering.

The fact that you're able to customize the program on an individual basis has been very helpful. That means I don't have to get involved with blocking certain things unless they are a common denominator among all our employees. If something keeps showing up, I'll get several requests to block it company-wide. Otherwise, the users can get in there and do their own thing and I don't have to worry about it.

It has definitely saved employees' time by not having to sort through junk and spam emails. We've turned it off a few times because we were having some issues or we had to change our mail server and, all of a sudden, people would say, "I got 50 spam messages." SpamTitan is definitely doing its job. It is probably 20 to 25 percent more effective than our previous solution.

SpamTitan is catching a little more than SonicWall did. It's about 10 to 15 percent more effective in that aspect. And the fact that it's a little more customizable has certainly made it a better solution.

It has also reduced our false positive rate by that same 10 to 15 percent. Nothing is perfect. You're always going to have a few that get through or that get blocked when you don't want them blocked. You just have to watch it and teach it. The longer we've been using it, the more refined we've been able to get it.

It gives our users the chance to interact with the program. They can decide if there are things that are junk mail that they don't want to be messing with, on an individual basis. Of course, I can always override that or control it from a company standpoint.

We use the geo-blocking feature to block a few countries, but for the most part, we leave most of them open. We deal with manufacturers that have office locations and factories in many countries, including Russia and China. But we'll block something like Afghanistan because we're not getting any business from Afghanistan. The geo-blocking may not have reduced our spam significantly, but it does block some.

I've been using TitanHQ SpamTitan for just about a year.

It's extremely stable. We've never had a failure such as their servers going down or anything like that.

It's probably very scalable for a larger company. I really only know it from our small company standpoint, but it would appear that it would work for a company of tens of thousands.

We changed to a new mail server and we had some issues getting SpamTitan working on the new one, from a traffic standpoint, IP-wise. It wound up being a port that we needed to open up that wasn't open. I went back and forth a couple of times before we finally figured out what the problem was, but once it was fixed it worked fine.

The engineer I was working with was obviously very knowledgeable and thorough, but he was probably used to dealing with IT people who deal with this stuff a lot more frequently and spend a lot more time with it than I do. Sometimes, they need to dumb it down a little bit and talk to their audience. They shouldn't assume that everyone is a subject matter expert.

My experience with SonicWall's support was pretty similar, although I've had fewer problems to deal with using SpamTitan than I did with SonicWall.

Positive

We were having problems with spam. We were using SonicWall and they had issues with a release that they brought out last summer. It wouldn't work with our server and software combination. They tried and tried and then I got tired of waiting for them to fix it. I went hunting, came across SpamTitan, and it seemed like a good fit. We've been using it since then.

With SpamTitan, our users have more access to their spam email than they were used to. We were limited with SonicWall. If you didn't get to your spam within three days, it was gone and you couldn't figure out what you missed. If you were on vacation, sometimes that would be a problem. SpamTitan doesn't have that problem as it can store stuff for a longer period of time. I believe it holds emails for 30 days. I can change that as an administrator, but I also have to be aware of the amount of junk mail that people get. Spam can really fill up a server pretty quickly, so you don't want to keep it around too long.

A frequent problem with SonicWall, because of that three-day limit, was that once a user had passed that, I had to get involved. If a customer wrote to one of our employees saying, "Hey, did you get my email?" I'd have to go find it. I don't have that same problem anymore. It has been greatly reduced.

In terms of the amount of time required to sort through unwanted junk and spam emails, SonicWall and SpamTitan are similar. You still have to go through your email and see which ones are junk. SpamTitan might be a little quicker because of how often it reports back.

SpamTitan is also an improvement over the SonicWall solution from a filtering standpoint. It is a win-win. In some ways, it was nice SonicWall did fail because we have a better solution now.

We had to disable the SonicWall version, which wasn't hard to do. Then we had to insert SpamTitan into the picture. It took a little bit of time, but not that much. It isn't something I do every day. I'm not an IT guy who deals with that on a regular basis.

It was pretty much straightforward, with a couple of minor issues. We couldn't get it to work and it turns out we had some bad IP numbers. They had given us an older version from the demo and they said, "Oh, we should have given you new ones when you bought the product." That was a minor glitch. Their support was good over the phone and they got me pointed in the right direction and it's been working since.

We discussed hosting SpamTitan in-house, because we had SonicWall in-house, but in this case the cloud solution seemed to be a better fit for us.

It requires very little maintenance. In the early stages it was more because we were refining the program and what it was filtering and not filtering. Now, there are probably weeks that I don't even look at it. There are times when I'll get a comment from one of our users who says, "Hey, can you do this?" or "I'm having a problem," and I might look at it then. But if I spend 15 minutes on it in a week, that's a lot of time, at this point.

We do see a return on our investment. It's not a lot of money, but we do get some return because people aren't wasting their time with junk mail and I'm not wasting my time trying to filter out more things because users are able to do that on their own.

One user is the same price as 50 users and there isn't a discount until you get to about 500 users. From a small business point of view—we're 30 people—there should be a price break before you have 500 people. Small businesses don't have a lot of money.

I looked around on the internet. There wasn't a particular solution I was looking at. I read a review about SpamTitan and that's the one I remembered. I liked what I read, it seemed pretty straightforward, and that's what we went with.

I looked at Proofpoint and a few other things, but a lot of them are designed for companies that are very large or at least medium sized. We're a small company and I wasn't going to spend tens of thousands of dollars. We don't have that in our budget for spam filtering, and SpamTitan was a lot more affordable.

We really haven't been looking at anything else, because we've been happy with the product. I like it and we're up for renewal and we will be renewing it. You're not going to renew it if you don't like it.

SpamTitan filters all incoming mail. We don't allow anything to come into our mail server without passing through SpamTitan. It filters out malware, spam, and any other email-based threat. It's a SaaS solution that's entirely on the cloud. Everything is redirected from our server to the SpamTitan servers.

They do the necessary filtering and pass all the safe emails through to our server. Our servers are configured to only accept IP connections from three or four IP addresses that are specific to SpamTitan, so nobody else can get into the mail server.

Our system consists of two physical servers and several virtual servers. One box is in the office, and there's a backup server at my home. The mail server just happens to be my home. We have about seven or eight end users, but each user can have multiple accounts.  

For example, we have an account for receiving special categories of mail that are placed in a designated folder. In other words, we create accounts that are associated with individual people. We have an online credit card processing company, so when they send emails, it goes to an email address called info@wegmanlevin.com. When it arrives here, it gets split off into a separate folder.

SpamTitan reduced the spam and malware that gets to our Outlook clients. The prior solution we used didn't do that great a job with malware. I don't know if the time spent sorting through spam has changed compared to the previous solution. 

However, sometimes malware would get wrongly classified as spam. Some emails that used to get through were flagged as spam, but it actually turned out to be malware. That should never have gotten through at all. It should have been blocked or stripped. In some cases, malware infected people's systems with the previous solution. 

I like the ability to go online and view mail that's been quarantined. SpamTitan lets you look at the mail and decide whether you want to release it or not.

SpamTitan doesn't quarantine when it blocks things based on the remote block list or greylisting. It just deletes the email. When I try to look at these blocked items, it tells me they're gone. RBL or greylisted items aren't saved, so you can check them. There may be a setting somewhere that I haven't seen. 

We get some false positives sometimes. Once we spot it, we can add the sender to the safe list. Then it's no longer a problem. It seems kind of random at times. For example, I got an email last night from the fraud department at Chase Bank informing me that my card had been compromised. It was flagged as spam, so I logged in and released it. It's a balancing act between a spam solution that's overly aggressive or too loose about letting spam in. I think SpamTitan falls on the aggressive side, but it's usually not enough to cause any problems.

I would also like more control over reporting. The reporting is limited to once daily. With the old product, we could get reports multiple times during the day with all the emails quarantined since the last report went out. We had one report at 8:00 a.m. to tell us about all the overnight traffic. We'd also get notifications at noon, and 5:00 p.m., just before people went home.

Over the course of the day, only a few hours would pass before we reviewed a quarantined email. SpamTitan sends its report in the middle of the night, so something can be trapped there for 24 hours. There's a workaround. If somebody tells you an email they were expecting hasn't come through, an admin can go into the portal and release it. That's a hassle. 

Also, there's an attack where a hacker generates emails with the correct domain name but hundreds of different user names. SpamTitan bills by the number of users, and they don't allow you to distinguish between real users and bots. I think I have a limit of around 30 or 35 users, so if somebody hit me with hundreds of phony names, I would get reports generated for each one of those fake accounts and be billed for it. It hasn't happened, but it could. I'm not crazy about that aspect of it. I think it would make a lot more sense if I could give TitanHQ a list of all valid email addresses and tell them to bounce any other email addresses.

We have been using SpamTitan for about a year and a half. 

We haven't had any issues with stability

We're a small law firm, so I haven't had a reason to scale up SpamTitan, but I assume I could if necessary. It's not likely to happen in my business. If we doubled in size, that would mean going from seven to 14 people. I'm sure that wouldn't present an issue for the software. However, if we had hundreds of employees, I would prefer an on-premise hardware solution.

I've never had a problem that required support, but I contacted TitanHQ support initially with questions about how to tweak some settings. I rate TitanHQ support nine out of ten. 

Positive

We used SurfControl, but the version was no longer supported on our server. We originally ran this on the Windows 2003 server, but the product wouldn't install when we upgraded. When we approached the vendor about newer products, we found that all their latest solutions were online and a lot more expensive than SpamTitan, so I started to shop around.

I set SpamTitan up by myself. It was straightforward once I conceptualized exactly what we were doing and the way we were deploying this in the middle of our mail delivery cycle. We have updated the configuration by adding more domains since the original implementation and it was easy.

If it blocks one piece of malware from getting into my system, it has probably paid for itself several times over.

The cost of SpamTitan is reasonable for what we get out of the solution. 

I don't recall the names of all the solutions we evaluated,  but looked at Barracuda and a couple of others. We felt that SpamTitan was the best fit, given the size of our operation, monthly costs, etc.

I rate SpamTitan eight out of ten. It's a great option if you're a smaller organization that wants to keep spam and malware off your system. A larger organization may wish to consider the on-premise solution TitanHQ offers because of the licensing issues and limitations on reporting. I recommend that if it's cost-effective for your organization.