TitanHQ SpamTitan Reviews

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.

For our clients who are big enough, and have the ability with their firewalls, we sometimes go in and put SpamTitan right on their firewalls. Or, if we are moving everybody to Office 365, then we use it that way with the Microsoft side of things. We also do a lot of refined stuff with that as well. 

We have some clients who have been around for a long time, meaning that their domain has been out there for a while and they have had a high turnover of workers. A lot of them had huge amounts of spam coming in. When we were running the Exchange servers, they were being swamped before we had something like this solution put on. Once we put on SpamTitan, it was a big relief for me. I could sleep that night. Also, it took pressure off our infrastructure. 

The deployment is fine. It works great. It is just one thing that we have to deal with, not a bunch of things. That makes it a lot easier than the way we were doing things before.

We had one company where we had to teach them about how SpamTitan works, even though the owner was teaching his employees not to open stuff and that they needed to be responsible. We then had to tell them what they have to do as well so they don't circumvent things as employees and users. One time, the owner actually opened up an email from Nigeria, and they are in Canada, where somebody was applying with a resume. It encrypted everything that they had. I asked him, "Why would you open up a resume? You're not looking to hire anybody. Why would you open something up from somewhere from someone you didn't know anything about?" This was a company that had satellite offices all around the region. It puts a lot of people out of work in a hurry. Having this type of solution put in afterwards helped a lot because they had been around for so long and had so much spam coming in. They had used their corporate emails to sign up for just about anything out there, so they were getting a lot of junk. We cut all that down, which was one of the things that has helped us. 

Once we were able to put them on to SpamTitan, because they only deal within a local area, we put the geo-blocking feature on for Canada. This saved on a lot of that stuff that was coming into them. When we turned it on, they removed about 40% of the stuff that was coming in. The spam was coming from outside of their location. So, that was a big thing. The geo-blocking feature makes sense whenever you can do it. You can also scrub the outgoing mail so you can protect yourself from getting on a blacklist, in case something was going wrong on your side of the fence. 

Another example, we have one company who wanted to make sure that credit cards and things like that were blocked. So, SpamTitan has things like that built-in.

With the ransomware stuff going on, especially with larger customers, they have to take this solution or we don't look after them. This is because we don't want our time and name dragged through the mud.

We now have tens of thousands of emails a day that we are logging for some of our customers.

Some clients don't want to know anything. Other clients like the fact that they have the opportunity to get this report. It comes in and shows them everything that has been collected. They can log in, manage all that at any time, and clean it. It is a safety net for them so they feel comfortable. In some cases, it actually helps in the education of the end user's infrastructure. You take them through and show them, and say, "You have some responsibilities and control here that you can manage. This is a top-level device to do this." Some of them really take pride in the fact that they can and want to do it. Therefore, it is a good tool that shows them why things are even being caught, how it appears, and why it is being picked up. The more that you can educate your end user, the safer you are keeping everybody.

We have just one place to go and look at things, which makes it a lot easier for us. Our users like the fact that it is granular when they look at it. Some guys are really proficient in certain areas and this lends itself to that, which is good. They can then learn the other parts that they didn't have when we were on other systems. You can just log into the back-end and can see everything or whatever you want to see. If you need to actually go through the email and look for one to release, it is easy to find. 

When the client gets it, we show them how they get daily reports. SpamTitan is easy for them to use and they can manage their own spam.

There is a built-in antivirus, we keep that turned on. It is really great.

We have set the attachment filters for inbound and outbound. We educate our people about attachments coming in. They will say that so-and-so sent us something, but it didn't come through. Well, it is not going to come through.

They have a huge amount of things that we haven't even probably thought about.

We aren't trying to develop software. We just want something to use. However, when you get into it, you can control the RBL servers as well as add ones to it, if you want to. There is your Sender Policy Framework (SPF), which is good because a lot of government agencies started using it. It is great that you can use it yourself and keep things compliant.

There are top-level domains if you want to start blocking at that level. You have all kinds of granular things. 

There are SMTP controls. 

I don't have to go into the server and do the updates. We just set the server to automatically stay updated by hour, week, etc. 

You can turn on macro scanning, which is kind of neat. 

We have the state-browsing database turned on that Google uses. We have that on ours. 

The patterning filtering is neat. Once you start along the patterns, you can see what is going on. This will sort of help with that. It is kind of interesting to see how these patterns formulate, then all of a sudden, you see what is going to happen. 

If you want to schedule and archive reports, it is great if you had to do an investigation down the road, then you can go back and look at that stuff. Because in those reports that you run, patterns will be there. Those things are really useful. 

When someone is looking at it, they find it intuitive and easy to get around on the back-end to do what needs to be done.

Before, I didn't know what some of the things would do if turned on, i.e., things that we hadn't used previously. Now, I see that they give you further information on it and take you right to a web page. That is something that I wanted done before and can see that it is there now. I did check this just the other day. That would have been a complaint, but it is not now.

Sometimes, things can get caught back in spam that you had previously released. Without going in, releasing the whole domain, and opening it up, since you don't want to do that often because the company can get infected as well, I have a couple of things that I previously released show back up again. I don't understand why this is happening, but I would like to know why it happened, e.g., did an algorithm change? It is important to know if I released an email last week why it was caught in spam the following week.

We have been using the solution for close to six years.

The stability is very good. We haven't had any issues at all with any of it. Everything that we have had an issue with is either because Microsoft Servers or Amazon servers has done something temporarily, or we have done something ourselves. The uptime has been fantastic.

From our perspective, it is very scalable because we are not a huge company. Our clients are all over the place. We have government offices, small mom-and-pop businesses, etc. We are in every sector, whether it be the retail sector, legal, government, etc. We do it all. Because of where we are located, there are not that many people who can specialize in and cover big and small businesses or organizations. Therefore, we have to look after everybody in their area and know a lot of different things.

There are all kinds of blogs and alerts. If you want to set alerts for yourself, you can do that. I haven't used it. However, when we were setting it up, we wanted to know, depending on your growth, what would happen if we brought on another bigger customer and you moved us to another system? You won't have to go through the entire setup again. You can just put multiple servers together and cluster them, then you can do all your controls from one server.

Support is really good. Recently, they hired a new person. This person works with people like us to find out if we have any issues or things that we don't like about TitanHQ's solution, e.g., the way that they do business or their features. I can just send off an email and get a quick answer that is directed to the right people, which makes a big difference to me. That is one of the biggest things that they did lately that is really good. 

I was frustrated with some of their million processes. Support got right in and straightened that all out. I know that they were probably amalgamating systems or something at the time. I'm not sure. However, that has all been sorted by one support person, and that makes my life a lot easier.

I would have rated support lower before. Everything used to be all siloed. You would go to either finance, support, licensing, etc. Now, I have somebody who will take it right to the top or to those departments, getting it straightened out. That is so important to me.

Right now, I can't complain about anything. I would now rate them as nine or 10 (out of 10). I can talk to my support person, Emma, first about something and find out whether I need to raise a ticket. I have a voice in the company that I never had before.

I like dealing with them because they are from Ireland. Sometimes, when I will call into major call centers, they are not personable. When you are talking to their staff from Ireland, it is a lot like talking to people in Canada. People are nice. I get that from all their levels, and I like that. I really do like that because I only get calls from clients when there is something wrong. So, everybody is always in a hyper state. When I call my backup support, they know that we are all working on the same level for the same thing. I am not greeted with someone thinking, "Do I really want to take this call or not?" They are polite and I am greeted with someone who is nice and genuinely wants to help. 

This is a big thing because I have dealt with some companies who were bought and taken over on the security side. We just completely left them because of their support and the way that people treated you. It is a big difference in feeling that they are nice.

Positive

We were doing some stuff with Barracuda. We had them for a few years. We also had one of the bigger solutions out there at the time; it was one of the first ones that was out. With the pricing model, I never knew where I really stood. It is alright if you have huge clients who warranted their stuff, but when we first started, we didn't have huge clients that wanted their solution. Instead, we had smaller clients. It helped us when we moved to this market with SpamTitan. I also knew where my costs were coming from. So, it was a little bit of a different move. A lot of people go to these solutions because they have huge clients at first. We didn't have huge clients at first, so it was a different way of getting into this business.

Once we moved to SpamTitan, we then looked at their other stuff, moving to ArcTitan and WebTitan as well. We use all of TitanHQ's platforms. It is a really nice system, as far as we are concerned. 

It is very easy to set up. It didn't take long at all. 

We worked with the TitanHQ team when we did the initial setup. They explained everything to us, e.g., if we wanted something on, if we didn't want it on, at what level, and how granular. That was good. When you are going with a new company, there is no way that you can know everything that you need to know about all of that. Something that is this important, you need to allow the experts to help you go through the steps, then you can go back to it on your own. 

Because the guys who are doing this on my side of the fence are in and out of it all the time, working with clients and checking on stuff, we are able to reveal the whole email without harming anything. We can look and see the entire background of where it came from and follow that through.

SpamTitan has helped us big time with improving our spam catch rate and reduced our false positive rate. This took a lot of weight off our shoulders because we were spending a lot of time managing the Exchange servers. 

When you are looking at what they were processing before people started using these cloud-type solutions, it really has made a big difference for us on the administration side. For example, when there is an attack going around the world, such as the ones on the news, that is a lot of sleep you can lose in a hurry from our perspective behind the scenes if you know certain clients who don't have this type of solution. 

All our clients warrant this type of solution. We just won't allow them to work with us unless we put these types of solutions in place, because it is too nerve-wracking. It only takes one client to decide that they don't want this, then they get infected, it affects all your staff and other clients, and then you have to spend time trying to get them back up and going again when something like this could have prevented it.

We have taken clients in and shown them how much email has been coming through. When showing them the back-end of it, e.g., the blocking and numbers, they are like, "Oh my God." Sometimes we will take a particular email and show them how much is coming through on that. We then tell them, "When you sign up for something and you use the corporate email, this is what can happen."

When it comes to the scalability of it, it really doesn't matter much because of the way that it is priced. You can put it on somebody who is small or big. I am not big enough to worry about growing out of anything that they are doing. You can put it on a different server for a bigger client, and that is not a big problem. I can still manage it from one place.

We looked at different platforms. We wanted to get into something that was intuitive on the back-end and where everything was visible from one place. 

We were the first ones for whom ArcTitan put in a Canadian server. We required mail archiving, but it had to be done in Canada because of client requirements. I couldn't find anybody in Canada that had a mail archiving server in Canada at the time, so I told ArcTitan about it. They said, "Okay, you are a customer of ours already on SpamTitan, so we will." So they flamed up a server in Canada and put it on Canadian soil, which is what we needed. We didn't have that anywhere else. Just the fact that they did that for us, and we were the first ones, it took about a month for things to get all done, but it was done. We were able to strike the Canadian server and put it on. I thought, "These people do want to do business. They care." That was great and I was impressed.

When I am talking to a client, I tell them we will be using SpamTitan. If they are a big company and require that their mail gets archived, then I also tell them about ArcTitan.

If you are starting off, do not worry because TitanHQ will help you set it up. Once it is there, if you have never used one before, it is no big deal. Once set up, you can look at it and read about it. You can see how it all works together. You get to see the movement of everything happening. You will soon understand it. It is not hard. It does have a lot of granular stuff, but only when you want to get into that does it matter. When you look at it, you get to understand it. It is like putting the furniture in the room is much easier to understand than when you are trying to picture it when there is nothing there.

For anybody who demands high-end control, I don't know what is not there. Everything seems to be all in place. I know that they are now using the new technology that is coming out, e.g., where you have the AI do some stuff.

You have some heavy-duty professionals running a global company to try and protect it and all these people. It makes me feel good that somebody big enough is doing this and they just don't hang their coat on the spam mail. They are doing archiving, where you have to understand another process - mail servers. They are also doing the web side of things. 

I would rate them as nine out of 10. The only reason that I am not giving 10 is because two years ago I would have given them a lower rating for being siloed. Since Emma has bridged all their departments for us, that has changed and been turned around.

Our entire bank is using SpamTitan in a virtualized environment at several locations. It migrates from one server room to a different one. For example, if a server room goes down, it just migrates to the second one, then it goes up there. We have a single SpamTitan virtual appliance, which is on both sides of our data center. When a data center is down or very load heavy, it just migrates to the second one and we work through there.

We have a lot less spam going through. Because of this, work hours are not lost searching through all the spam emails to determine which ones are legitimate. This saves our bank clients' time since they are not forced to search their inbox for legitimate emails between spams. Not a lot of spam is going through. I think time is essential and we are gaining a lot of it with this solution since a lot of emails are automatically filtered out. 

We have gained back 50% of our time. Our management had some contacts with huge amounts of spam coming. For example, every morning at 10:00 AM, one of our managers already had more than 100 emails. Of those 100 emails, more than 80 emails were spam. He had an easy email to guess, making it easy for spammers to add him to their spam portals.

It is easy to work with.

SpamTitan is visible right away. You go to the portal, log into your page, and everything is visible there, e.g., your whitelist, blacklist, etc. So, it is very good.

SpamTitan has a cool vehicle called IP delivery pools. We have 20 domains with various products and are using this feature to send mass emails.

In history on the reporting graph, when you are trying to search for sender by address, it won't search by domain. I could send an email from SendGrid with my domain, but with SpamTitan, if you search by that domain then it wouldn't search it. It only searches from the field, not in the envelope field. Unfortunately, mass mailing companies, like SendGrid, send email with the form address and that completely differs from the domain envelope form address. There is no way to search for the envelope form. So, I gave them an idea to improve this filtering. For example, if I have to search an email sent by SendGrid, then I am forced to search by the recipient, then find the emails marked as spam. This is quite a huge hassle. They told me that they are aware of this and will try to add it, but they haven't added it yet.

I would like to implement a secondary delivery pool for mass mailings, having an alternate pool for mass mailing lists since there is only a single mail queue with SpamTitan. For example, if 10,000 emails are being sent, then the queue will be large. Unfortunately, without a secondary delivery pool, legitimate emails will wait in the queue to be delivered to my email. Therefore, I would like to have two queues: one for everyday emails and another for mass mailings. Now, I have to decide whether to buy a second SpamTitan license just for this reason because I am very satisfied with the functionality of SpamTitan overall and don't want to use another sender's appliance for this.

From 2020 to 2021, there was a huge switch in the types of spam coming in. SpamTitan's anti-spam should be enabled to catch this spam. The spam catching rate went down over the last three to four years. I think this is because spammers are evolving and using different methods to send spam emails.

The phishing rate of SpamTitan is not great, even Exchange Online Protection catches phishing better than SpamTitan. The most worrying are the phishing emails. I would like SpamTitan to upgrade and improve the phishing catch rate.

The sandbox of the Bitdefender engine is not working correctly. They sent me an email that they pulled it because it was not working as it was intended to work. So, they are working on this as well, and maybe the sandbox will be fixed. The sandbox is for viruses. If something goes through then it is sent to the sandbox for analysis. However, I am not using the sandbox right now. I am just quarantining this type of attachment right away.

I have been using it for about seven and a half years.

SpamTitan has had several bugs, even now they have one or two bugs. However, they can think of a workaround, then apply it for us. They are very helpful in this regard.

There isn't so much maintenance. For example, when a new version arrives, we just take a snapshot and upgrade it. One time, we had a problem after they upgraded something. It was not working correctly, so we opened a case and they helped us. I think this was when we migrated from version 6 to version 7, but it was fixed fine just in a matter of hours.

Another issue was where SendGrid had a very high spam rate with SpamTitan, so I opened a case. They told us that this was a bug with the engine and it would be fixed in the next version of SpamTitan.

We have had several small quirks with these types of engines, and it has just been the matter of fine tuning them.

On one version, we had an issue when the Bitdefender antivirus engine was stopping. That was about three years ago or so. This issue was fixed after upgrading the appliance. It was some kind of bug, and they fixed it in the next version. With this issue, I received an email that the engine had stopped. Then, I went through the appliance and it started the engine. It would work for a week or so, then it would hang again. I cannot remember any more bugs.

This solution needs to be 100% stable and rock-solid because our organization is a bank and quite dependent on email communication. That is why we have stayed with SpamTitan for seven year since it is a rock-solid solution.

We have approximately 8,000 endpoints, but only 5,000 or so are using outside bank communication of some sort. We have a 5,000 user license, which is more than enough for us at the moment. We are not hitting the 5,000 mark. If we hit it, then we would buy additional licenses.

It is a small company. I have quite a lot of experience contacting different kinds of support, e.g., Microsoft, Forcepoint, etc. SpamTitan has one of the best supports.

They are very responsive, friendly, and knowledgeable people. I never had an issue where I raise a ticket for a problem and they got rid of me, like Microsoft does all the time. That is why I think that 70% of the product's value is its support.

With one of our other products, there is a problem. We opened a case about five months ago and they don't have an estimated time for fixing the issue. Whereas, with SpamTitan, if they don't have an estimated time for fixing an issue, they have some kind of workaround in place. They connect to us and implement the workaround, then test it with us. Then, if we are happy, they will leave it alone. I don't have to talk with anyone else. 

SpamTitan support has never had me hanging with an unresolved test in seven years. I would rate them as 10 out of 10 compared to other solutions, like Forcepoint and Barracuda. For example, Microsoft support didn't have the necessary product knowledge. The Level 1 support of Microsoft had zero knowledge and their Level 2 support knowledge is zero and a half (out of 10). Only level three of Microsoft support, which is very difficult to get to, is quite knowledgeable. 

SpamTitan is a very small company. They don't have Level 1 and Level 2 support. Their support is just as knowledgeable as they can be. There are no layers where you are passed to someone who knows more. Right away, when you are contacting support, they know their product just fine and are aware of things.

Right now, we have one open case regarding IP delivery proof. We have a small problem with it. I think it is a bug, but I am certain they will fix it. 

There is not a product out there that works 100%. I am a very old IT administrator. I know that every product has its bugs, but there are only several companies with whom I have contact that say they can and would fix their bugs in a quick manner. SpamTitan is one of them. For example, we had a huge problem with the new antivirus engine built within SpamTitan. Even though they pulled back the old engine for us, they reconfigured our on-prem SpamTitan to be able to fix this so-called bug. So, they are very good at helping us fix issues.

I would rate SpamTitan's technical support as 10 out of 10. First and foremost, if there is a bug or problem, they are doing their best to fix it, which is a good thing.

Positive

We had Forcepoint anti-spam in place about eight years ago, then it expired and Microsoft didn't continue to support the product. So, I was forced to search for a good, well-rounded anti-spam solution that would be cheap and had good support.

I chose SpamTitan because it was cheap and the rating was quite good. I just wanted to test the solution and determine if it would be okay for us, then we would get it. If not, then we could find something else more costly. When I tested it, we had some little challenges and their support was great. 

The spam catch rate went through the roof when Forcepoint just ceased to exist because Microsoft killed off the product. The spam catch rate began to rise because no engines were updating. After we implemented SpamTitan, we right away saw that the spam catch rate was very good, even before fine tuning. However, we had several false positives when legitimate mail was caught. Even today, legitimate mail is sometimes caught as spam, and it should not be. This is so much less now because we have been fine tuning SpamTitan for seven years. The spam catch rate is quite high at approximately 96%.

Forcepoint's stability was good. It was not hanging or doing anything wrong. It was a very good product. I cannot comprehend why Microsoft killed off this solution, because it was very good. Forcepoint anti-spam was a very good solution. It worked just fine, but Microsoft somehow managed to kill it.

Another huge plus for SpamTitan is its ease of implementation. You can do it by yourself without any help from SpamTitan support. It's very easy to deploy and configure. The manual is also easy to understand.

I liked it after about two months because we managed to fine tune it and set it correctly. After about two months, I was able to confidently make a decision about buying this product and implement it in our bank. They have added a lot of very useful features since then.

I deployed it myself without any help from anyone. Afterwards, after I deployed it, I had several questions as well as several fine tuning that needed to be done with the spam engine. I opened a case every time and TitanHQ support helped me. 

SpamTitan has helped save employees’ time by not having them sort through junk and spam emails. In our environment via group policy, we have disabled junk filters on our mail clients. It is not useful for us anymore. So, it is only being filtered by SpamTitan. 

For our most valuable clients, we have enabled access and they are managing their own whitelist, blacklist, etc. If someone is quite knowledgeable with email clients, we can even deploy the SpamTitan Outlook plugin for them. With this plugin, they can configure their blacklist and whitelist, e.g., marking someone as a whitelisted sender for them only. It is quite a useful feature if you know how Exchange works. If you know what happens when someone blocks someone else via Outlook junk filtering, that is through Active Directory, then it is synchronized with the edge server. So, it is a pain to find where it was blocked.

Our help desk is saving half an hour to an hour. Now, the administrators only need to go to the SpamTitan portal. We have a small group of help desk technicians who are administrators for SpamTitan. They go into the SpamTitan portal looking for history about why something was blocked. This takes three to four times less time when finding out why mail was blocked.

From a price-performance ratio, it is one of the best. It does not cost a lot and does its job just fine. If you fine tune it, it is just ideal.

The pricing is ideal. A lot of other anti-spams are integrated in Exchange, counting technical mailboxes that are not sending any emails outside. So, they are not scanned and only for internal communication. SpamTitan only counts the emails that it scans. This is one of the best licensing models that I saw for anti-spam solutions because it is counting dynamically the number of emails that senders are sending. It counts these uniquely by week. It provides a very realistic picture. This is very useful because we are not counting the emails doing inbound or outbound notifications from our company. 

We are considering buying Link Lock, which has an additional fee. I need time to test and trial it, so the purchase is currently on hold.

For a small company, it would be just a great solution because it doesn't cost that much. It is very easy to install and configure. The support is just great. 

When we were forced to find something else because Microsoft Forefront ceased to exist, we looked at FortiGuard Antispam, which was quite good as well. We also looked at Barracuda's anti-spam solution, but it was very costly so I didn't even bother to evaluate its functionality.

SpamTitan was quite a reasonably priced solution. When we began to test, we had trials with FortiGuard Antispam and SpamTitan. We didn't manage to test both of them in time. Then, we bought SpamTitan for a year, testing it for a year in a production environment. When you configure the anti-spam solution, it works and isn't $100 million.

This anti-spam catching grid is quite good. It is not perfect, but none of the anti-spam products are perfect. I compared it to several competitors, and it has one of the best anti-spam catch rates. You need to fine tune it because it is not perfect out-of-the-box. It depends on the organization's mail flow going through. I had to fine tune it with their support several times in regards to our mail flow. There are several built-in engines where they are raising or lowering spam confidence levels. Right now, the spam catch rate is quite good for us and much better than Forcepoint ever was.

It is quite a good solution compared to other anti-spam solutions. There are anti-spam solutions with better catch rates.

We had one reason to switch from SpamTitan. One of its antivirus engines was a Kaspersky antivirus engine, which is Russian ex-KGB, though this is no such thing as ex-KGB agents in Russia. When Georgia had a war with Russia, we lost 20% of our territory to them. So, we began to see what products have Russian roots, and SpamTitan had a Kaspersky antivirus engine. Our concern was that Kaspersky could do something wrong with Georgia. I sent an email to SpamTitan and told them, "We are from Georgia and you are using a KGB-operated antivirus engine. We are thinking of switching to another anti-spam solution because of that." They told me that they were planning to switch from Kaspersky. Several months later, they switched to Bitdefender antivirus engine. So, I was very happy to stay with SpamTitan.

I have recommended SpamTitan to six or seven companies who have been using it for several years. They have been very happy with it.

We are not yet using the geo-blocking feature.

I would rate SpamTitan as nine out of 10. However, four years ago, I would have rated it as 10 out of 10. No spam was getting through four years ago. Now, a lot of phishing emails are getting through. The solution should be more precise on phishing emails.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 utilize the solution to send all our email to their cloud to filter it.

The biggest benefit of being a partner of TitanHQ is being able to offer their products across the board, whether the client is a small company with five people, or a growing or midsize company, and it even works for some large companies. WebTitan even comes with an on-prem DNS proxy, so you can also proxy all your information. You can also dictate who has access, who gets filtered, and who doesn't get filtered. For us, it's quite easy to sell it because it's not overly complicated and it doesn't require lots of modules.

With SpamTitan there are large savings for IT because they are not bombarded with phishing emails and thousands of spam emails, bad URLs, and bad domain names. The filtering technology helps safeguard their environment and, by the same token, it actually frees up time for folks to do some work that is native to their environment and not waste time.

It helps employees save time, as well, because they're getting the emails that they expect. It could be saving them 90 minutes a day, on average, and maybe more, if people have some training. If we're talking about IT folks who earn in the range of $90,000 to well over $100,000, 90 minutes times 10 guys could be over $1,000 a day in savings. It adds up fast.

If you're dealing with email threats, users will not use their email if they think they have been attacked, so they won't be working. The IT guys that handle tickets are then tied up and have to manage the tickets. A ticket goes up the chain to the correct group and they have to analyze it and decide whether it's something they can do or if it goes further up. If they can't handle it, it's going to go up to cyber security. We're talking about four or five people that have touched it, each spending 10 or 15 minutes. Multiply that by X dollars and it adds up. They have to get in touch with the user, check the unit, and they might have to take that person offline. And maybe the person who makes a lot of money a year is tied up for an hour. Before you know it, you're $1,500 in the hole, just for one phishing email, because you don't want it spreading, and you don't want the person on the network. It's a snowball effect. One wrong click and you could be in trouble really fast.

The system analyzes and catalogs what's good and what's bad. The cool thing about SpamTitan is that it saves a report on what it did not allow to hit your inbox. You can then easily block those domains, which is helpful because people will use different names before the "@" symbol in an email address. By blocking the whole domain, no matter what they do, they can't send you any email via that domain. 

It's pretty straightforward and pretty easy to use. It's mostly automated and that makes it easy for an IT department to keep tabs on it.

The key differentiators of the product for an MSP are its ease of use and effectiveness. It generates reports and makes things easy for IT to manage. It's a set-it-and-forget-it type of solution. It gives you one pane of glass. There are two different cloud URLs but you just create a shortcut on your desktop and IT people can jump in and out of it in seconds.

We also use the geo-blocking feature a lot for clients that don't have interests outside the US. If they receive stuff from overseas where they don't have a relationship, we can turn off that flow. In the future, if they start working with, say, a Chinese company, it can be turned back on. It makes it convenient for dictating how an organization deals with the outside world on an everyday basis. As soon as we turn it on, we notice a massive increase in protection, in terms of the number of emails being caught.

We can watch the results almost in real time. It has a pretty consistent synchronization with email clients, whether it's O365 or a web-type email. You can still dictate what comes in. If you don't like Gmail accounts or random Yahoo account emails, you can filter them out. Bad people use any trick they can get their hands on, including fake company names that have one extra letter. Or they will say an email is from the president, or it is an alert. They use scare tactics to get you to open and click on things.

The geo-blocking ability is really important because a lot of outside threats are coming from other governments. There's a lot going on, like espionage, hacking, and the stealing of data and trade secrets. Companies are ruthless, so it's a free-for-all on the web if you don't have a solid front door for protection and your walls are made out of "paper." You need steel walls now and multiple layers just to keep things at bay.

SpamTitan's internal technology definitely does a great job analyzing where something is coming from and analyzing the technical side of the data. If something was redirected, it can detect the origin and track down where the server it came from is. Even if the IP range changes, it can let you know where the origin was. It's pretty good at doing its job.

In terms of geo-blocking exceptions, I have bought products from the UK, and their updates and download packages all come from outside the US. I can instruct it so that the UK, specifically, is open. I can also allow just that particular UK domain and if I see unwanted UK addresses, I can add them to the blocked domain-name section. That way, I can have something open and still block others at the same time.

With the geo-blocking tool, it would be nice if it listed checkboxes for all the countries and had one overall checkbox for the whole area. Right now, you have to start typing them all in, or half type them, to get the list. That's time-consuming and is one thing I don't like.

Also, it would be nice to know when the DNS proxy version needs to be updated. They should send out the customer's version number, and why it needs to be upgraded, a month or two before it's necessary. That would be helpful so we don't find ourselves wondering why the DNS proxy we have right now just randomly stopped updating, when it's because a new version came out.

Their room for improvement is minuscule. It's more end-user or IT types of fixes, rather than functionality. The functionality is great. It's just that the ease of use could be improved for someone who didn't know you have to type things in. It should be easier for a junior IT guy to get in there without having to say, "How do I do this?"

We've been using SpamTitan for about four years. We are an MSP and SSP, which means we're on the security side, and we are a TitanHQ partner.

The stability is awesome. They have a very high 99.9 percent uptime.

A lot of companies that offer cloud services definitely go out of their way to have that high percentage of uptime. If your email goes down, you're not able to talk to anybody. It has to have a high rate of uptime. It's comparable to other solutions.

This is the most accurate threat detection and content filtering tool on the market today. It has flexible deployment options, including roaming clients for all operating systems, and Active Directory integration. It has features to fit your organization, whether you're fully remote, hybrid, or back in the office.

Their tech support is great. If I have a question or it stops working, they're really quick. I can open a ticket and work with a technician and they're pretty good at helping resolve issues. They're very effective. And they go out of their way to meet with folks and give you the support that you're looking for.

Compared to some of their competitors, they're quick. You don't have to wait three or four days for someone to pick up a ticket. Other solutions can be a little slower, in my experience. The level of expertise from TitanHQ's support is right up there. The engineers or the people that deal with the product every day know the product like the back side of their hand.

With every problem I've had, they've knocked it out of the park.

Positive

We were using DNS filtering, but we soon realized we needed more security.

WebTitan Cloud is a cloud-based web filtering solution that allows you to monitor, control, and protect your users and business when online. It requires no on-premise software or end-user client software, and the setup of the cloud filter is extraordinarily simple and quick.

They have very detailed support page with easy-to-follow guides and if you get stuck you can request support. We did ours in-house and was pretty straight forward to roll out. The support team is Top Notch!!! 

The ROI is low because it is a hosted solution and the technology is on the backend. This saves us a ton of time each month.

Block Malware, Ransomware, and Phishing Advanced DNS Web Security and Content Filtering Software. WebTitan helps control the web content your staff accesses and protects your business from online threats with powerful DNS filtering. The setup and low cost are a huge plus!

We picked SpamTitan over other solutions. I like its usability, affordability, and ease of maintenance. It's constantly being tweaked behind the scenes. There are small things that happen under the covers that we don't see, but they're definitely wise to what's going on out there. There aren't many cons to the solution.

Just because they're not extremely expensive doesn't mean they don't work. You don't have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on something, just to get it to work. TitanHQ does a great job with the product. They do a lot of advanced DNS scoping and a lot of preventive work against phishing and malware. They definitely protect their users quite effectively. And they have a 14-day trial so you can try it out.

As an MSP, there are aspects of the product's technology that helps us acquire new customers and add value. First, it's pretty straightforward and easy to roll out and add to someone's layers of security, which makes it an easy and affordable solution. Also, it's not extremely expensive. Other solutions get really pricey, really fast. In addition, WebTitan and SpamTitan work hand in hand. I recommend getting both. It also has a dashboard for both so you can see what's coming in and what's getting blocked, what the URL was, and it even divides it up by categories with overall percentages. That way, if you want to tweak the way people surf the net, you can certainly do that.

The bad guys (Bad Actors) have lots of money and lots of bad helpers. They probably have more resources than you do. They're trying to get in and you're trying to block them. It's cops and robbers. But with the right tools, you can make your good guys' house really strong and defeat most of the bad guys. Obviously, they don't want to get caught, so the more they hang around or try to get into something, the more likely it is that something is going to track them. If there's enough tracking, you can find out their IP, because everybody has one assigned and it goes all the way down to their username and address. Unfortunately, there are super-smart ones and you'll never see them coming. There's just nothing you can do about that unless you have a locked-down local environment with no outside access, and some places do that.

Small and medium companies, with the growth of hacking and malware, can be prime targets for attacks. There are studies that show that half of SMBs have suffered cyber-attacks. They need security that works for them to keep them safe from constant attacks. I would highly recommend SpamTitan, and I have been in the industry for 35 years. It's very effective and very easy to use.

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.

TitanHq host the solution and I subscribe to it. I forward our email to them and use them as an incoming and outgoing email gateway.

I now get hardly any spam. I run a small email and web hosting business with about 30 clients. They were always complaining that the proprietary spam systems that I had weren't working, and we were always chasing our tail trying to clean it up. People who are involved with email know that most spam comes from people who indiscriminately sign up to email newsletters and the like. But user behavior is difficult to change. The old system that I had, the native system on the email server, with a couple of plugins that were involved, was just not doing it. It was fairly effective, but I was still getting lots of spam. Now, that is basically gone. 

When TitanHQ first approached me, they told me that with SpamTitan our spam would disappear. And they're absolutely right. It has. And not at the expense of genuine emails either. It really has changed the whole spam issue. I get no customer complaints about spam anymore from those people who have signed up with my organization.

Before I started using SpamTitan, my spam system was quarantining about 800 emails per day, and a lot more were getting through. Now, my spam system quarantines maybe two or three per day. That's how effective it is. My own spam system isn't really being deployed because everything that comes into the server has already been cleaned sufficiently. That means the SpamAssassin that I use along with the email server really doesn't have to deploy at all, which has a positive effect on server and its CPU load. The email server is able to be in the business of relaying email, as opposed to checking everything and having to put things in spam folders and quarantine folders.

Another really excellent benefit, and this is not client-dependent, is that all outgoing email is now checked for spam. That means I have an extra security check on what happens on the server. There are between 300 and 400 email boxes on my server, and it only takes one person to be sloppy with their login details and somebody can be using the box to relay email. Just yesterday, there was an example of that. SpamTitan caught it and stopped about 300 emails from going out. That was a bonus because I wasn't expecting to have outgoing emails covered as well, but they are.

The fact that it does exactly what it says on the box is what I find most valuable about SpamTitan. They've reduced our spam by about 99 percent.

SpamTitan is not particularly configurable. I basically have to accept their parameters for a lot of things.

There are also delivery limits, something like five emails per minute per mailbox. They do that, they say, because they want to maintain compliance, but I can't configure that. I can't be more aggressive about that if I want to be. 

Another example is that I have a couple of clients that send out membership emails, and that causes some problems because we're not able to configure SpamTitan to enable those emails to go smoothly. I have to do a work-around at our end for that.

There are a lot of parameters that, if I want changed, I've got to ask them to make the changes. In short, I'd like them to make it more configurable. To be fair, it's a small price to pay for what they're doing for us, but a bit more ability to configure limits would be good.

I've been using TitanHQ SpamTitan for between six and eight weeks.

The stability seems to be absolutely spot-on. There are backup and redundancy strategies involved. If one server is down, there's another one available. I have never been aware of the backup MX record having to be used.

The proof in the pudding is really our customers' feedback because, had there been any problems in terms of stability, I would have heard about it from our own customers. We've had no complaints. The only thing I have heard from our customers is, "Thanks for doing whatever it was that you did." I have managed to take the credit for what SpamTitan is doing for our clients. There have been no issues at all in terms of stability or reliability.

I'm offering the incoming mail spam prevention as a premium add-on to what I offer to my clients. I have four or five clients that are up and running with it, and another three are on a trial. But for the price point that I'm at with SpamTitan, I could probably take on another 15 clients very easily. Our business is very small in volume in terms of what a company like SpamTitan are dealing with. I don't envisage any problems with scalability, even I were to double over the next year.

At the moment, for outgoing email the solution is monitoring about 300 email boxes, and for incoming email, about 50. If more of my clients sign up for the premium offering that I've suggested to them, to cut down on their spam even further, I would like to expand usage of it. I'd like to sell it to all my current clients.

I'm still learning about what they have to offer. We're using SpamTitan as a blunt tool to stop spam, but there are so many other things that are on offer. I have probably only scratched the surface. I haven't really spoken to anyone at length yet, other than the salespeople, about the other things that are on offer, because of time constraints on my part.

In terms of getting to a resolution, and in terms of professionalism, TitanHQ support is first-class. They're not very user-friendly, but I can deal with that. That's a common thing in the IT business. But they are professional and efficient.

SpamTitan is the first external email gateway that I've ever used, so I can't compare their support with its competitors. I could compare it with a payment gateway, like Worldpay for instance, which I use for one of my clients. Worldpay has a great offering, but their technical support is a bit brusk and monosyllabic and not always very helpful. Compared to Worldpay, SpamTitan are much better, with the caveat that, as I noted, SpamTitan aren't all that user-friendly. Sometimes IT people can appear as if they're being put out a bit when you ask them questions about the product. I can live with that. At the end of the day, as long as they provide a resolution, I'm cool.

Positive

The setup and ease of use are an eight out of 10, where 10 is easiest. They set up most of it for us. I had to do some work at our end on DNS and it was sorted. That was easy enough.

There's a wee learning curve to the user interface but it's easily negotiated, and once you understand it, then it's fairly straightforward. I would rate the overall intuitiveness of the solution at seven or eight out of 10.

Part of the reason that there was some difficulty for me at the very beginning was that I didn't quite understand how the product worked. At that time I was really only interested in the end results. One phone call got that sorted out. When I started to understand how it worked, it made it so much easier for me to understand how the configuration was put together.

I did a trial that was supposed to last for a month, but I signed up after a week because it was working so well. Getting it set up was fairly time-consuming because each domain that was added to SpamTitan involved tedious work with the DNS. But the setup on the SpamTitan side was relatively easy and very quick to deploy.

What it is doing for us at the moment is more than value for the money that I pay. I've already recouped the cost of the solution from my customers who have signed up for it. 

It's a no-brainer for me. It has 

• given me less work to do
• knocked down the number of support calls
• totally eradicated support calls for spam.

And the net cost at the moment is absolutely nothing. I do realize that the cost will go up if more of my clients sign up for it. It's not something I'm looking to turn a profit on. Still, financially, it has already helped the business because we've got more time to devote to other things since we're not putting out spam fires constantly as we did before.

If all of my clients were to sign up for it, it would be worth about £5,000 pounds a year in extra income for me.

As a small business, every penny is counted here. All businesses have had problems over the past couple of years with the pandemic. I really thought that something like SpamTitan would be more expensive, but it cost me about $70 (or about £60) a month. I'm more than happy to pay that.

I looked into other solutions, but most of them were in-server, a piece of software that I would have to buy a license for. I would have to be responsible for the configuration of them as well, which would mean upskilling on my part and my employee's part. One of the other solutions I looked at was a fairly big multinational company. The thing that got me into SpamTitan was that they cold-called me. That gave me the thought that, "Oh, there are cloud solutions like that out there. Let me have a look to see what they are."

After having done a bit of research and due diligence on SpamTitan, I went to the SpamTitan website and found out that, with two clicks, I could set up a trial so that's what I did. I couldn't do that with the competitors. I was getting it for free for a month to try it on a couple of domains. They were quite happy to extend that if I required an extension, as I was learning how to cope with the system. They were very confident that it would work and, in fact, it did. 

I didn't do as much research as I might have done otherwise because I wasn't thinking that it was a mission-critical thing. It was just a thought at the time that something like that would be a bit of a luxury. It would cost me some money but might be quite useful. I have since found it to be far more useful than that.

My advice is go for it. Absolutely. I really have no hesitation saying that at all. With a lot of software solutions it's usually "horses for courses." How they work depends on your workflow. But with SpamTitan, it's absolutely a binary situation. There are no ifs or buts. It stops the spam coming through and it's amazing.

This sounds hyperbolic, but it's easily the best purchase that I've made since I started this business, 15 or 16 years ago.

I have paid for things, and sometimes I think they're a waste of cash but I'll keep them in place because there might be some small convenience involved, but this solution is really well worth it. I really was pinching myself at the beginning and wondered, "Is it really going to be that effective?" So far—and it has only been six weeks, so there's always that caveat; maybe there is some disaster that's ready to befall me down the line somewhere—honestly, it's just been superb.

It's definitely a 10 out of 10. I have some issues with the technical support, but when it comes to spam detection it would either be a zero or a 10 for me. It hasn't reduced my spam by half—even that may well have been worth the money that I pay for it. Rather, it has cut it out altogether.

The only spam that I get now, doesn't go through SpamTitan. There are some fairly clever spammers who manage to email directly and bypass SpamTitan, but I very seldom get spam. What I do get all seems to come from New Zealand, strangely, and not from the usual suspects, like the Far East or Russia. It's very much in the Southern hemisphere. But what I do get is minimal.