TitanHQ SpamTitan Reviews

We are a support service provider here in Israel, and we have 200 to 300 clients. We use SpamTitan for a service that we give to our clients, which includes those who have Office 365 and those who have the on-prem Exchange service.

It has reduced the risk of getting viruses from emails by almost a hundred percent. We are giving services to hundreds of companies, and it makes our work a lot easier when SpamTitan is filtering threats. About two or three years ago, there was a ransomware or virus attack in Israel, and all the customers who were on SpamTitan were safe. They were free from that risk. A lot of customers who didn't have SpamTitan were impacted by the attack.

It saves time. When you properly fine-tune it for your needs, there are almost no calls about the service. It's constantly working and pretty much accurate in filtering emails. It's about 99% accurate. We have customers using Microsoft 365. When they moved to Microsoft 365 the last year, they decided not to pay for this service, but it blocks better. It works better than Microsoft 365. They have some spam emails passing through Microsoft Defender or Microsoft 365 protection.

We use the geo-blocking feature. In Israel, we get a lot of threats from all over the world, and we are not using all the domains. We are filtering more than a hundred domains, but we also have companies or customers who work with other countries, and they do want to accept emails from everybody, such as Brazil, Amsterdam, etc. We offer it as a service. If they want me to block emails from certain countries, we do that. When this feature is on, it does help. It works as expected. I never had a customer complaining that we used some geo-blocking filter, but they still got emails. So, it does help.

The system in general has some advantages in terms of the way it works. They describe it as having 99.9% success in catching spam, viruses, and other things, which is quite true. I like the way it works. 

First of all, it has two tests for the email or the connection that comes. The first one is whether it's in a blacklist or an SPF record, which helps determine if it will allow the sender to continue and insert the email into the system. It does fast tests from my point of view, and it almost filters 50% more junk email, and if it's a blacklist, it works 100% from my point of view. It blocks the messages that fail the SPF test. SPF is a standard policy framework that tells the recipient server whether the sender is authorized to send an email for that domain. If some devices or PCs are not allowed to send emails for that specific domain, it already blocks that, which saves a lot of hassle and a lot of pressure on the server. The content filter comes in the second stage, which means the email was approved in the first stage. The content filter does a couple of tests through the anti-spam engine and the antivirus engine. It also has a sandbox. If the email has an attachment, it opens the attachment in the sandbox to decide whether it's a virus or not or whether it's a threat or not.

It has two antivirus engines: ClamAV and Bitdefender. It has the OCR technology or the content filter to identify familiar words or hazardous links inside the content. It has link locks and all kinds of features. I have tuned off some of the settings because the tests that it's currently doing are good enough for me. For my usage, it's at the right level for getting the email safely without being hassled by customers for releasing email in quarantine, etc. There are certain levels that you want to reach. First, you want the mailbox to be safe, and second, as a provider, you want a lesser number of service calls. So, you need to adjust the setting and fine-tune the filter engines at a level where the service calls are logical and acceptable. Otherwise, you would find yourself hustling with hundreds of customers because they don't understand why something is being blocked. Doing mail forensics is quite complicated, and nobody likes it. So, in that way, the system is very good. It provides nice fine-tuning options.

It should have reporting capability. It has logs, which are very extensive. It catches all the SMTP connections to the servers, but when you have hundreds of domains, you need to wait for about an hour for the logs to open, and there are millions of lines. If you want to find something specific, such as an email coming or an IP connection, and you want to troubleshoot that, it's very hard. So, I would recommend building a reporting system or log viewer with some filters. Currently, it is everything or nothing.

The queue management could be better. If you are under attack and you get thousands or hundreds of emails, you can't control the queue. You need to call them, and they delete the garbage from the queue behind the scene. Otherwise, your server will be blocked.

I have been using this solution for 14 years.

It's very reliable. We have been working with it for almost 14 years. I can count on one hand the number of times we have had any problems with the system. Usually, the problems are related to cleaning the queue, but when it comes to technical problems, that has happened only five times in 14 years. It's very good.

It can grow. You can add more servers to the cluster. You can move to the cloud, or you can have a mixed setup. It's very scalable.

We are a quite large company that gives support to a few hundred customers. We have two servers in a cluster. So, it's a cluster environment. We have a top supporter that has access to top-level management. We have domain management users who have only access to domain-level management, and of course, each user can manage his own mailbox or his own setting. There are three layers of management in SpamTitan.

I have contacted them many times. I would rate them a 9 out of 10.

Positive

We used Atera in 2009 or 2010. We had their service. It was nothing compared to SpamTitan, but that was about 14 years ago.

I deployed it. It was straightforward, and it didn't take me long. It worked pretty fast. It was a fast process. In terms of the setup, the servers are in our hosting farm. They are not in the cloud. They are on-prem.

It's easy to use. Setting it up required a bit of figuring out the terminology and what they meant by what was written out there. Nowadays, they have improved that. Each section has a help option or information explaining what it does, what the setting is all about, and what to choose in case you want to change it, but it wasn't like this in the beginning.

In terms of maintenance, they provide system updates once in six months. The rest of the engines, such as the antivirus engine and the anti-spam engine, get updated hourly. They need updated signatures. They are updated automatically almost hourly, and it's done in the background without any disturbance.

It's easy to sell once the price is okay. It's easy to make deals. There is an ROI.

Compared to the market, its price is fair.

I remember a new version of Atera was coming out. I tested that, and I tested Cisco IronPort. I probably also played around with Barracuda, but SpamTitan was very easy to use and manage. It took me two hours to learn the whole system. It was very fast to set up.

I would recommend it depending on an end user's needs from the system because not all of them want the same thing. However, the system is straightforward, and it's filtering emails.

I would rate it a 10 out of 10. It's very good. It's one of the best.

SpamTitan is our primary defense for email against spam and viruses.

We have it running on a virtual machine image that they gave us. It is hosted in our data center.

We have noticed a trend of approximately 5% growth in spam per year, versus legitimate email, and SpamTitan seems to catch almost all of it.

Using SpamTitan saves us a ton of time. We have users that get literally thousands of junk emails a day. The longer you are at an organization, the more spam you seem to accumulate, and it seems mostly the owner specifically. In our scenario, they went from getting like two or three thousand junk emails a day, to now just two reports a day. They don't have to go through each email to filter what's actual work and what's just junk.

We had some users that were spending two or three hours going through email. There is a huge difference for some people, although it depends on the user. Some people do not use email often so it's not really beneficial for them. For the people that spend a lot of time sending and receiving email, it's saved quite a bit of time. It is upwards of hours in a day. Also, it saves me a ton of time because it prevents them from clicking the wrong thing.

Twice a day, it sends a report of what it has caught. I haven't actually looked at the report in perhaps two years because the accuracy for my inbox was always dead on. At the same time, however, we have a lot of users that check the report all the time. One reason is that they may have a new client that is accidentally classified as spam, or they receive a legitimate email that contains a lot of spam keywords. One of our clients is a large equipment manufacturer and they send legitimate emails with marketing taglines that sometimes get flagged as spam. For the most part, we have very few false positives.

SpamTitan is good at catching zero-day viruses and spam messages.

One feature that helped us a lot in the past year is the Link Lock. It will check the URLs that are included in messages and if they're not trusted sites then the link will be blocked.  For example, our users will receive an email that says something to the effect of "Your password is about to expire, so please click on the enclosed link." If they click on the link, it causes a huge headache for us. Now, it's automatically blocked, which saves us a ton of time.

The Link Lock feature will check every URL in your email against a database of legitimate URLs. A malicious URL might go to a phishing site or a hacker site but if it isn't in the list of valid URLs, it will respond with a message that says "Blocked by SpamTitan Link Lock". It re-writes the URL so that it goes through their server, rather than the URL itself.

We just recently turned on the geo-blocking feature to block emails from Russia and Ukraine. We don't monitor the email that is blocked, unless it comes under the "relay denied" classification. That is approximately 2% of our total intake.

We use the whitelist feature to allow exemptions based on trusted senders. This is an important feature because we have approximately 12 sub-companies, and there is a good deal of marketing material sent between people. We configure them as trusted senders so that the messages don't get classified as spam, due to a large amount of marketing material. The whitelist allows them to communicate with each other and not get filtered out.

The user interface is great. Everything is in the browser; it is easy to set up and there are not a lot of tabs.

Most of it is simple to use and the side that the user sees is pretty intuitive. That said, there are grades of difficulty based on user experience.

When an email is quarantined, there are a couple of different search filters to help find what you're looking for. Having more choices would be helpful because as it is now, we can search for inbound or outbound, the score, the subject, and the email address. I would like to see a filter for searching inside the message content when it is quarantined.

I have been using TitanHQ SpamTitan for approximately seven years.

This is a stable product. Our current uptime is 412 days. It was offline at the time because we had an outage in our data center. We had something plugged in wrong, so the fault was on our side.

Our service from them has been steady, including our daily antivirus updates. We've not had any problems. Stability is very important to us because if this goes down then we don't get any email.

We are not really seeing a heavy load on the machine that we host it on, so I assume it could go much higher. Now, we have a 500-user license, but we seem to be going over it every day. For example, at the moment, it's showing 755, so we're probably going to increase to a 1,000-user license when it comes up for renewal in another month.

With a current load of approximately 6%, I'm sure that it can easily go to 10,000 users on our hardware.

Everyone in the company uses it, although I and the CTO are the only two administrators. Our CTO takes care of the management, whereas I am the network/security administrator. I normally perform the maintenance, although the CTO does it sometimes.

If I need support, I can immediately send a ticket and click connect on the website. They'll be able to go in and do whatever they need to fix an issue.

Initially, we were hesitant to join because they are based out of Ireland and we were concerned about being able to get support. However, it's never been an issue. I'm the main contact for support, and I might call them once a year for a weird issue. Usually, they get back to me within 30 minutes.

I would definitely rate their support a ten out of ten.

Positive

Before SpamTitan, we used to use MailGate, from Tumbleweed. The biggest difference between these two products was the price. The functionality was very close to the same but SpamTitan is approximately 30% of the price. Similarly, both are pretty stable and I wouldn't say that one was more stable than the other.

We switched because everything seemed to be as good as it was with solutions from the other big providers, with a huge difference in cost.

It took us approximately an hour to set it up, and most of that time was on Office 365 to route incoming mail through SpamTitan first.

Ease of setup is something that was more important to me than it was to management. They would have preferred to use a free, open-source product. The problem with the open-source products is that anytime we needed to make a configuration change, it would take three or four days of research to figure out how to do it.

This is in contrast to SpamTitan, where there are only eight or nine tabs, with eight or nine subtabs on each one. For the most part, setting it requires visiting perhaps six tabs. If you have a question about any of the features, there is a question mark icon on the browser explaining each one. It's pretty well organized from the administration side.

We implemented it ourselves.

We have realized ROI from our time savings. It has saved me hundreds of hours because we have people in one department that would constantly click on links that were bad. Most people would know not to click on them but certain people would always click on malicious links. Once that happened, they had a virus and it was sending out viruses to everyone in their email contacts.

Every time that happened, it cost me between 50 and 60 hours of time to fix the problem. It was an absolute nightmare that used to happen once or twice per month, and now the incidence of that has gone down to almost nothing. 

We implemented SpamTitan over other solutions because of its price. The functionality of all of these services is pretty much even, with the main differences between them being support options and where you can deploy them.

For other vendors, we had to purchase their hardware or employ a cloud solution that adds thousands of dollars per year to the cost. SpamTitan is something that you can put on your own hardware and it runs great.

The only additional cost was for Link. It isn't expensive, at perhaps a dollar extra per user.

Management was interested in saving costs by using an open-source solution. However, they are more difficult and time-consuming to configure.

We also looked at Barracuda and we didn't find much difference between the two, except for cost. We chose SpamTitan because it is more cost-effective.

We have not had any issues with the product, the pricing is probably better than most vendors, and the support is definitely top-notch.

My advice for others is that if you're looking for a simple solution that you can deploy quickly, especially if you're on a budget, then I definitely recommend SpamTitan. You can have a full solution within a day.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

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.

Almost all of our email spam filtration goes through SpamTitan.

Most, if not all of our customers, benefit from SpamTitan because of the way it eliminates really dangerous spam. It is called “vaporizing.” It will vaporize bad and very dangerous spam so that our customers never even see it and there's never a chance for them to click on something that could potentially be dangerous or hazardous to their networks. It's a very nice security feature for us. People are still mostly the problem when it comes to becoming exposed to network vulnerabilities and SpamTitan takes some of that responsibility away from them.

When it comes to our organization, as an MSP, I have a handful of techs who work with me and, because the interface is so intuitive and simple, it has made training them very easy and quick. In addition, because TitanHQ’s support is so fluid with their own product, they're able to get us the answers we need and we're then able to implement fixes for customers.

Out of the gate, it takes a little fine-tuning to get the numbers right, but it definitely saves time for our customers’ employees because they don’t have to sort through junk and spam emails.

The big aspect of TitanHQ’s technology, when it comes to acquiring new customers for us as an MSP, is the way it sandboxes all incoming email attachments. That feature allows an email attachment to be run as if somebody had opened it, without causing any threat or concern to our customers' environments. The solution can open the attachment, run through it, and make sure there's nothing malicious about it. If there is something malicious, it destroys it. If there isn't, it passes it on. 

On average, it does that in less than a second and that means a customer never feels that something is scanning their attachments. Nobody is going to notice a one-second lag in email delivery. It provides a lot of security and peace of mind for us, but it doesn't bother or interrupt a customer’s day-to-day functions.

The customer-facing panel, what the customers actually log in to, is where they can release spam email, or allow and block email addresses or domains, was also a big selling point for us. We like how customer-friendly the interface is.

We have submitted requests for a feature which would be a total control panel. It would have a footer at the bottom of every email and list things like

• the original source of the email
• what its spam score was when it passed through the system
• original or source IP's
• other, more technical information.

Our previous spam filter had that type of feature and it saved us from having to log in to the panel online, search for an email, pull it up, and figure out where it came from originally and why it got the spam score it did. That would be a huge improvement and time-saver because then we wouldn't have to log into the web portal for that. It would be at the foot of every single email that passes through the system.

We have been using TitanHQ SpamTitan since January of 2022, so about six months.

We have it deployed across about 20 different Microsoft 365 environments, using Exchange Online, with about 600 mailboxes in total. We run it in our office and that is also Microsoft 365.

It has been stable. We had one update, in April. Other than that, it has been completely stable. We can log in to the panel and see the uptime. It's only been restarted once, after that update, and otherwise, it has been up 100 percent of the time.

Scaling it is very easy. It's just a matter of submitting a support ticket to increase the overall number of mailboxes we're paying for, and then we just keep moving forward.

We plan to increase our usage of SpamTitan. We have five customers still in Reflexion and they will be moving over in the next two months. At that point, we'll be 100 percent SpamTitan.

The biggest benefit of being a partner of TitanHQ is the support. Every account manager seems to go above and beyond to ensure that we have the information we need and that we have it in a timely fashion. That goes for every support ticket and interaction we've had with them as well. In addition, they're just genuinely a friendly group of people to work with.

Account and customer support stand out for us as an MSP because we interface with them a lot.

We used Reflexion. We switched because it was bought out by another company that decided to sunset the product. It hasn't had any major updates in quite some time and it was beginning to be a security hazard.

Reflexion was a stable product. Where it fell short was with updates in security. It ran and was always there, but it was falling behind.

Our initial deployment was a piece of cake. We did it on the phone with SpamTitan in about 12 minutes. It was phenomenal. I had another technician, on our side, involved in that phone call.

The product, in general, is very easy to implement and it's very effective. It doesn't require any babysitting or hand holding. You just tie it to the platform you're using for email and it goes to work. You do a little bit of fine-tuning based on feedback from the customers. Then, it's just a matter of checking on it occasionally.

We've got it down pat now. We make the necessary DNS changes, build the customer information in the new SpamTitan panel, and schedule a cutover with the customer. We cut over the MX and DNS records and usually, within minutes, email is flowing through SpamTitan successfully. From there, it's just a matter of working with the customer, usually for a couple of days, to help fine-tune the spam score so that stuff that shouldn't get caught gets through and stuff that should be caught is stopped.

In terms of maintenance, SpamTitan support sends us an email to let us know when there is an update. We schedule downtime, log in to the panel, and do the update. The entire thing takes less than 30 minutes.

For us, the ROI is the time we get back from not having to babysit the solution or have people trying to figure it out. And for our customers, it's a time-saver because it's very easy and intuitive to use. It's quick.

The pricing is very fair. We've been very happy with it. You just pay the bundle fee for a group of mailboxes.

We tried three other options before we settled on SpamTitan.

First and foremost, we went with SpamTitan because of the ease of use inside the web panel. What our customers have to see when they click on something is a factor we take very seriously, and the customer-facing panels from the other contenders were just terrible. SpamTitan has that all figured out, cleaned up, and it presents very well. When a customer who's not techy clicks on the link and needs to release or block an email, it makes it very simple and clean for them.

Customer support from TitanHQ has been top-tier, top-notch, the whole time we have worked with them, they have been on it. As for the others that we demoed, while they did respond, it didn't feel like they were as comfortable with their own products as SpamTitan’s techs are with theirs.

We haven't had any conversations about things that need to be improved in the solution. Nobody has any major complaints. For the time being, it's a pretty solid solution out-of-the-box and we're not looking for any immediate changes.

Just try it. Install it, run it, and try it. It’s incredibly simple to use, it sets up in minutes, and there are wonderful account and support teams. Just do it. Just use it and the product will sell itself.

We primarily use the solution to filter out all the spam messages and go through and review other messages that get tagged as spam and figure out what's real and what's not.

It's cut down on our amount of spam. It has cut down on the number of ransomware attacks which are all generated from email. It's definitely helped out that way. Occasionally I do get one where I need to ask "Hey, is this real?" However, I can go in there and look through the filter and see that one got through, with another 30 being blocked. In the learning pattern that it offers, it can realize tricky emails may have been spam and will tag everybody else's as spam as well. That way, only one, maybe two users might get it. It is really good at seeing and learning. 

The spam blocking has been good. I like the fact that I can go back in and review old messages that had been tagged as spam before my users can get to them and either delete them so they can't approve them or allow them through.

We use SpamTitan's geo-blocking feature. I have many rules set up. Obviously, in the spam world, the spammers find ways around not being tagged as spam. We tend to get the same type of messages over and over again. Therefore, I have phrases set up to block messages. We're blocking mail by region as well. The geo-blocking feature for restricting emails from specific destinations based on IP or country is fantastic. It works great. All of our business here is done throughout the U.S. and therefore we block most of the stuff from other countries. If I start to see a bad habit form I can block that country or region.

It's not always just spam. A lot of times it can be phishing attempts. There may be people trying to email, saying "Here's your invoice for this product," and it was obvious it's not a product that they had ever ordered. In this day and age with phishing and ransomware, things come through via an unassuming email. We need to protect ourselves against ransomware and this works great. I don't care about junk messages that come through about buy this, buy that, and all this stuff. It's more of the ransomware that I get concerned with and we're trying to block it.

The geo-blocking feature allows us to block spam emails entering our network and servers, reducing our spam intake. In terms of spam reduction, it does equally as well as some of the other items that we've used. However, I really like the features. I would say it easily catches 95% or more of spam. Occasionally, you do get something that slips through, and it's always going to happen.

The user interface experience of SpamTitan is "easy peasy." I like the user interface. It's fairly self-explanatory, fairly easy to figure out, and if I ever have a question, I can call them up or open a support ticket and get an answer really fast. Their support team is fantastic.

It has helped to improve our false positive rate. We don't have very many false positives. The only time I have false positives is from rules that I created. I get people that will sometimes use a phrase or something that will get caught up in the filter. False positives are my own fault, from me tightening security down even further than it should, as I have certain phrases that I use in there, and if somebody puts one of those phrases in, word for word, then they're going to get blocked, and that's happened a couple of times. However, it allows me to go through to check. The users will say, "Hey, I was waiting for an email from this person. They say they sent it and I haven't got it," and then I see them, I see that message in there, and I release it.

It probably saves employees some time. I've never asked them directly, however, I know it has to save them time as they don't have to go through all those messages and figure out what's good and what's bad.

Sometimes when I'm trying to pull up reports, the speed can suffer. If I'm looking at the last seven days, if I pull up just today, when it's retrieving the message history, if I pull up with the last hour or the last, or that day, it's fine. However, if I have to go back several days, it could take a little longer than I'd like it. That said, I'm usually not in a rush. Still, sometimes it does get stuck there for maybe a minute or two. It makes me question the network, however, when I check the network speed, it seems fine. It's not a major, major concern. However, if I had anything, I would ask that they try to find a way to retrieve those older messages faster.

We switched over to SpamTitan in 2020, although we did have it before and we had to archive it. We started using it right around April or May of 2020. It's been about two years now that we've been using SpamTitan.

The stability of the solution has been great. It's been a stable platform. The only one thing I could ask for is when you're going through to older histories it's just a little slow when you're trying to pull up messages older than a day or two. You try to pull up messages that are three, four, or five days old to go look for an old message, and it just seems like it wants to take a little longer than it should. We're also on a cloud solution. I don't know how many other users are on this cloud. Maybe it has to do with too many users on the cloud trying to do searches or incoming mails at the same time. I'm sure they'll figure it out. 

It's pretty scalable. It works. We have it for our particular organization and it just fits perfectly. We make it work for us. We have certain email addresses that we always allow through and sometimes it does catch a false positive. Our false positives are a lot less, and that's due to the rules I created. It's just whitelisting those and blacklisting the other ones that we don't want. It works great.

I have 30 users, however, some people have double email addresses as they have an alias address. We're dealing with about 40 email addresses. 

Their support is A+. If I can give them an 11 or a 12 out of ten, I would. They've always been there for me when I've had questions. They've answered anything I've asked within a very reasonable amount of time, and if I've ever needed any help they've always been there to jump on in and explain why.

Positive

I switched when I took back over for this company. We had an in-house solution, a Barracuda box, which was in-house, and when it was time to upgrade the hardware, Barracuda was just too expensive. It worked really well when we first got it. We enjoyed it when we first got it. However, also with Barracuda, I had to be onsite or VPN'd in so that I could look at messages, whereas with SpamTitan I can be out there doing wherever. 

I first demoed SpamTitan five years ago when I was working for a different company, and we went through their demo process of it, and then when we went through to do the purchase of it, the credit card transaction failed as it was out of country. It was based out of Ireland. The owners didn't want to do business where money was going overseas. In the end, they made me find a local company.

We went with a different company that was local to the U.S. then and used them for that company. However, when I came back to this company where I'm at now, and we decided, "Okay, well it's time to get rid of this Barracuda box," I went straight to SpamTitan as I had already had experience with them and with SpamHero, which was web-based. It was nice, however, I remember that I had liked SpamTitan so much better and I was a little frustrated at the ownership of the other company that they didn't want to go with the SpamTitan.

To me, the interface and the ease of use were a lot better, whereas the other one, when I hired a new user, it would quarantine all their mail until I went in there and there was an extra step that I had to take on another product that we had. 

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. The instructions that they include with it are easy. It was very easy to set up through Office365 in my DNS. The instructions were straight and clear, right to the point. I probably could have given this to my kid and he could have figured it out.

The ease of setup and ease of use is always important. However, I don't remember how long it took me to set up. I would say when we had it in-house and our mail was coming in-house, it was set up fairly easy. I want to say it took no longer than 20 minutes just to get it set up and working.

I had to call TitanHQ at the outset. I had questions about the way the phrases worked. It wasn't really with the setup of it, however. While I didn't need them for the setup, when I was looking to block phrases, I wanted to make sure I wasn't looping myself and causing myself more of a headache. I did have questions on blocking certain messages, as we also had one email address that nobody else has that we didn't want messages to be filtered from. I did have to call them to ask them, "Hey, how can I make messages to this one user not get filtered so they get everything?" We got them on the phone and we had it fixed in less than five minutes.

We've definitely seen an ROI in terms of just the amount of spam that's cut back and hack attempts that we've been able to block and filter out. For those reasons alone, it's definitely worth it.

It is probably one of the more reasonably priced options out there. SpamHero was right in line with the same pricing. However, their interface and their usability are not as easy as SpamTitan. 

You get fantastic service with this product. In contrast, if I wanted to call Barracuda with an issue, they never returned calls. It's all web-based, so you can't get anybody on the phone if you need stuff with Barracuda, and when you do it's like pulling teeth. 

With SpamTitan, based on their price and actually being able to get somebody on the phone, it just made it worth every penny.

I did not look at other options. As soon as I came back to this company and realized that we needed to switch from Barracuda when it was time to upgrade the hardware, I knew we were more budget conscience. Barracuda is nice, however, it breaks the budget, and it was also a physical device that was in the building. I couldn't remotely manage it. I remembered SpamTitan and the demo I did before and decided to definitely go with them.

With SpamTitan we have our mail, mail that used to be in-house, until July 2021. Now we're using Office365 for our main mail, however, our SpamTitan has always been hosted on its own cloud. We're on the SpamTitan cloud.

I'd advise any new users to just sign up. Just don't even bother considering it, just sign up and go with it. You won't regret it. Its ease of use, ease of setup, and ease of admin all make it worthwhile. Everything is just so easy.

I'd rate the solution a ten out of ten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Within our company umbrella, 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 keywords, in addition to its artificial learning capabilities. 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 were malicious or that were from random domains that are known to be used for spam. Anything that comes 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 quarantine. If they look good to you, you can release them, and you'll immediately get them in your inbox."

As a result, we do 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. When compared to before we got SpamTitan three and a half years ago, hours a week are now being saved for every single employee. They no longer have to dig through junk. At the end of 2021, when I ran our yearly report, it 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. 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 time dealing with that.

The geo-blocking feature definitely reduces our spam intake. The last time that I checked just geo-IP blocking, we had about 12,000 emails that attempted to come through in the last six months and were immediately stopped. They were stopped because we 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 two years. 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 I don't 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 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 feature 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 what it is which can be a little daunting for people completely unfamiliar with the concept.

I have been using TitanHQ SpamTitan for three 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 to work the way that I needed it to. If there ever was 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 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 had 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 demo setup 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 solution worked without a setup headache was SpamTitan. 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 three and a half years that we've been with them, they've added them, and they have not increased our cost. They've not even asked us to sign on for additional features. They just added them to their product and they were available for us to use. Having the same costs that we've been paying and having new features added is awesome. They give you an update without charging you more for it. I like that a lot. It makes you feel appreciated as a customer.

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

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

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

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

We 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.