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Harvey Hochkievich - PeerSpot reviewer
Directory of IT at a manufacturing company with 51-200 employees
Real User
Dec 11, 2022
Huge reduction in spam, easy to use, and good and steady price
Pros and Cons
  • "I like its ease of use. As director of IT, I'm often in contact with our staff to make sure that they're safe and secure in their usage of email, etc. The quarantine features in SpamTitan make it really easy for them to review messages that haven't come in, and the rating of the score helps them determine whether or not they want to look at them at all. So, I see the quarantine feature as one of the best things in SpamTitan."
  • "There is no plugin for Outlook, which might be of an advantage so that you can just click on a link in Outlook that takes you right to your quarantine list. It doesn't have that at the moment."

What is our primary use case?

We use it in front of Office 365. We have 365 in the cloud. We use SpamTitan in front of it as a filter to make sure we don't lose anything in our protection, or our onion. It's just one more slice of the skin.

How has it helped my organization?

It has been a long time, but I know that they did some benchmarking back when it was put in. My understanding is that it has improved the blocking of spam by 50% to 60% from when we were relying on other products to do that. I wasn't here when they implemented it, but looking back at some of the old notes, there has been an improvement of 50% to 60% of less spam coming through. That is huge. This 50% to 60% reduction in emails certainly makes a big difference.

It has definitely saved employees time by not having to sort through junk and spam emails. The daily report that lets them pick and choose what they would like to pull through is much easier than having to go through the whole list of emails, etc. They don't worry about it much. They look at that report, and they determine what's worth taking out of it. It's not very often that they pull anything out of it. It's a quick look, and you're done, rather than scrolling through 20, 30, or 100 emails that would've got through and you have to sort them out. It's definitely a time saver.

I know it only takes them seconds to go through the SpamTitan list, review it, and just delete the SpamTitan email. I know it's not taking a lot of their time just from looking at my own report. On a daily basis, I get a report that shows 60 to 100 emails that were blocked by SpamTitan, and I know I don't have to go through those. I just need to have a quick look. The only thing I do is to look for stuff that I was expecting that got caught by SpamTitan, but that doesn't happen very often. It's a huge time saver from that perspective.

We get maybe one or two calls a week, maybe in false positives, where SpamTitan caught something that should have gone through. One or two false positives in a week are excellent. That just means my team doesn't have to worry too much.

What is most valuable?

I like its ease of use. As director of IT, I'm often in contact with our staff to make sure that they're safe and secure in their usage of email, etc. The quarantine features in SpamTitan make it really easy for them to review messages that haven't come in, and the rating of the score helps them determine whether or not they want to look at them at all. So, I see the quarantine feature as one of the best things in SpamTitan.

There is ease of use for the individuals who are accessing it. It doesn't require a lot of training. It's intuitive. You can see what you need to see. They get their daily reports so they know what they're looking at. If they're missing something they were expecting to come in, they can contact the help desk, and we can take care of that for them. It's easy for my team to find things. The filtering setup on it is quite good.

What needs improvement?

I personally haven't gone through SpamTitan enough. I don't necessarily need the reporting features and whatnot. There are a lot of things that might be of value, but at this point in time, I don't use them. If there was a way to increase the frequency of the daily report, that would be helpful. Somehow I thought that it was just a setting. If it's not a setting that I can change, it would definitely be helpful to have that come two times a day: one during the day at one o'clock or two o'clock in the afternoon and one overnight. If they could adjust the frequency of the reporting so that I could have it two times a day, that would be helpful.

There is no plugin for Outlook, which might be of an advantage so that you can just click on a link in Outlook that takes you right to your quarantine list. It doesn't have that at the moment.

Buyer's Guide
TitanHQ SpamTitan
August 2026
Learn what your peers think about TitanHQ SpamTitan. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: August 2026.
912,069 professionals have used our research since 2012.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using this solution for about five or six years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It has been extremely reliable. We haven't had any outages or downtime with them. I can't remember anything in recent memory. In the last year or so, we haven't had any outages. We haven't had any problems. Our team has had a few questions about configuration, and they were responded to very quickly. It's very reliable. It's always on, and it just works.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We haven't had to change it a whole lot. I don't know for sure, but my understanding is that it's very flexible. I get a call from our sales rep, and we walk through the options and determine whether or not we're going to change. One of the questions I have is whether we need to change the number of access points, and the answer has been no for the last couple of years. So, I assume they scale quite well, but I don't know for sure. It didn't seem to be an issue from their side anyway.

In terms of its usage, we have a single location. We're a manufacturing company. We have one location, and it's deployed across the network here. I have roughly 143 users, and I have two admins to manage that. It reduces the effort on part of my admin team, but it also reduces the effort on part of the users themselves.

How are customer service and support?

My team has had the occasional reason to call them up when they weren't sure of a setting that they needed to change. The response has been quick. It has been easy, and they've met all our time frames in terms of responding. So, we've been happy with it.

I would rate their tech support a ten out of ten. They're very responsive. They're very quick, and the answers are succinct. There are no issues.

How was the initial setup?

My team didn't have any trouble implementing it and getting it running quickly with the cloud team. Originally, it was on-premises, and we went to the cloud three years ago. The switchover and implementation were great. There were no issues, problems, or hiccups.

Its maintenance is very lightweight. It runs in the background. We don't have to worry about it. We haven't had any issues with failures, outages, or anything. It has been excellent.

What was our ROI?

What I pay for it in the year, I definitely recoup all of that in the time saved for my team and the users in terms of not having to deal with problems.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Its pricing is good. We've been happy with the pricing. I know that they did some extensive research, and the pricing was quite favorable with everything else that they looked at. My budget hasn't changed a whole lot over the last three to five years. It's nice to see that it has remained pretty steady. So, I am happy with the pricing. It provides good value for money.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

My team here did a pretty good job comparing two other options against this particular option, and SpamTitan was head and shoulders better.

What other advice do I have?

I would advise doing a good comparison with other mail filters. Do your due diligence and take a look at the other options and list both sides of the equation. You'll find that SpamTitan is better than whatever else you're looking at.

SpamTitan has a lot of nice features, but we haven't got to utilize all of them. We haven't used the geo-blocking feature. We've thought about turning it on, but we don't use it at the moment, and that's just a matter of we haven't gotten to it yet. Similarly, we haven't yet used ArcTitan or EncryptTitan. We're pretty much using the basic version of SpamTitan. We'll be looking at all of the options for SpamTitan as we move forward.

I would rate it a nine out of ten because I don't know all the options. I haven't utilized all of what we could. I haven't explored the rest of it, but I would highly recommend it. I have no problem recommending the product. I know it works quite well. It functions, it works, and I don't have to think about it much.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
Proprietor at Fellcroft
Real User
Dec 8, 2022
Reasonably-priced, simple to use, and reduces the support and investigation required for suspicious emails
Pros and Cons
  • "Its simplicity is most valuable. It does what we ask it to do. The filters work, and we are able to set the levels and give the clients or end-user access to the quarantine through a simple email."
  • "A lot of the other companies that I deal with have a feature that allows you to modify emails and apply signatures automatically based on linking into Azure's servers and database. That feature isn't there in SpamTitan."

What is our primary use case?

SpamTitan for our clients, and it's there just as a spam filter for them.

How has it helped my organization?

It reduces the number of support calls and investigations into suspicious emails.

It's not something the clients think about after the initial rollout. It just becomes part of their daily work. The advantage is that the client doesn't have to think about things or spend too much time sorting through things as the vast majority is done before they get anywhere near it.

The geo-blocking feature blocks spam emails from entering the network and servers, reducing spam intake. It has probably reduced spam intake by about 80%. It mainly restricts based on the country of origin, which is something the client doesn't think about, but it's important to me because I have to pick up the pieces.

The geo-blocking feature allows exemptions based on a trusted sender's IP, domain, or email address. The feature is there, and it does work. It's not something that we have to change too often.

It has helped save employees time by not having to sort through junk and spam emails. The whole point of doing it is that end-users don't have to troll through hundreds of spurious emails. If they don't see them, they get a list each morning, and they can decide if any of them is worth releasing.

It has drastically reduced the amount of time that employees spend going through emails. They only get the ones they should.

It has improved the spam catch rate and reduced the organization’s false positive rate. That's the whole point of it. Otherwise, we wouldn't use the service. There is a 70% to 80% improvement.

We are an MSP of TitanHQ. The aspect of TitanHQ’s technology that helps us acquire new customers and add value to our services or product offerings is that it's very quick to roll out. It's very quick and easy to configure, and it's very quick and easy to modify as required.

TitanHQ’s key differentiator for its partners is simplicity. Some of the other packages that we use are quite complex and awkward and not necessarily easy to configure or logical.

What is most valuable?

Its simplicity is most valuable. It does what we ask it to do. The filters work, and we are able to set the levels and give the clients or end-user access to the quarantine through a simple email. It works in a very straightforward method and doesn't require a lot of maintenance.

What needs improvement?

A lot of the other companies that I deal with have a feature that allows you to modify emails and apply signatures automatically based on linking into Azure's servers and database. That feature isn't there in SpamTitan. 

Others have the facility to remove certain bits of text. For example, if somebody sends an email from their iPhone, it always says, "Sent from my iPhone." On a couple of other services that we use, a feature is available to strip known phrases and also to strip things like obscenities from emails that are being sent, just in case you have an employee who is misbehaving.

For how long have I used the solution?

We have been using SpamTitan for three years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I've had no issues with it. So, it has got to be very stable.

Its stability is on par with the other solutions that I have used. Stability was never an issue.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It's scalable. You can go as far as you like or as low as you like. You can go from one user to 200 users very quickly and very easily.

It's deployed on multiple locations, multiple devices, and multiple platforms. There are just under 40 users for this one.

How are customer service and support?

It has been very good. I've not had much need to use their support, but when I needed their support, it was there. Their support was very good in terms of expertise, attentiveness, and speed of response. I would rate them a nine out of ten. Nobody gets a ten.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We were using Mimecast. We switched because SpamTitan was a simpler solution, and it was also cheaper.

How was the initial setup?

It's a cloud solution. It's on Azure, and it's all Microsoft based.

The initial deployment was very straightforward. We required a couple of tweaks, which the support team sorted out in a reasonable time. 

The deployment took about 30 minutes. It was very easy to set up, configure, and then use SpamTitan. It doesn't require any maintenance.

What about the implementation team?

It was just me.

What was our ROI?

I suppose we have seen an ROI. We do make a margin on it. I don't have the metrics because it's just a revenue stream at the end of the day. We could earn more money off some of the other products that are out there on the market, but that wouldn't necessarily suit the client.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

It's priced very reasonably. There are no additional licensing costs that affect me.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

I looked at some of the other solutions, including BitDefender and Kaspersky, as well as Mimecast. SpamTitan stood out in terms of the simplicity of the system.

What other advice do I have?

I would definitely recommend this product. I would rate it an eight out of ten. It just lacks a couple of features.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Microsoft Azure
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor. The reviewer's company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: MSP
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
TitanHQ SpamTitan
August 2026
Learn what your peers think about TitanHQ SpamTitan. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: August 2026.
912,069 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Network Specialist at Alabama Fire College
Real User
Dec 8, 2022
Had a huge impact on our spam, freeing our employees to be more productive
Pros and Cons
  • "The safelist and blocklist are the best parts. If I've got a new contact coming in, I can safelist that domain or email address. Alternatively, I can block the domain or the email address if I'm getting harassed by someone. I like the ability to get down to that granular level if I need to block or allow an entire"
  • "Emails from companies we work with often get flagged, and I have to go in and release them. For example, I made a hotel reservation today from Marriott that got blocked. I'm sure hotels spam people, but I wish there was a way to know that the email was to confirm my reservation and for it to allow that through."

What is our primary use case?

SpamTitan is the email filter we use to drastically reduce the amount of spam we get in our inboxes. We're deployed at two physical locations with several departments. Altogether, it's about 360 email accounts.

How has it helped my organization?

SpamTitan has freed up our employees to be more productive. They don't need to waste time sifting through a bunch of garbage emails. I'd say it's at least a 50 percent improvement. It has had a huge impact on our spam. You can go in every day and look at the amount of emails that are blocked. It's doing an outstanding job.

What is most valuable?

The safelist and blocklist are the best parts. If I've got a new contact coming in, I can safelist that domain or email address. Alternatively, I can block the domain or the email address if I'm getting harassed by someone. I like the ability to get down to that granular level if I need to block or allow an entire domain.

What needs improvement?

Emails from companies we work with often get flagged, and I have to go in and release them. For example, I made a hotel reservation today from Marriott that got blocked. I'm sure hotels spam people, but I wish there was a way to know that the email was to confirm my reservation and for it to allow that through.

For how long have I used the solution?

We've been using SpamTitan for around two years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

We're pleased with SpamTitan's stability so far. We've had just zero issues with it. The stability is probably about the same, but the previous solution didn't catch spam the way SpamTitan does.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

SpamTitan scales easily. 

How are customer service and support?

TitanHQ's support is excellent. I rate them eight out of 10. 

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We were using Office 365's built-in filter, but I needed something more robust. I did some research online and tried a SpamTitan demo. It seemed to do an excellent job, so we went with it.

How was the initial setup?

Setting up SpamTitan is very straightforward, and it took a couple of days to deploy. You only need to make a couple of DNS changes, and it's ready to go. It doesn't require much maintenance after deployment. Occasionally, I go in and safelist an email or a domain when someone's expecting an email but not getting it. I check to see if the filter caught it. Once I mark it as safe, we don't have any more issues.

What about the implementation team?

We leaned on SpamTitan's tech support to help us get up and running.

What was our ROI?

We have seen a return on investment.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

I think the price is fair for the service we're getting.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We looked at other options, including McAfee. I can't remember the others, but I looked at about four or five options. Ultimately, it came down to price and performance.

What other advice do I have?

I rate TitanHQ SpamTitan eight out of 10. When you deploy SpamTitan you should consider the filter sensitivity and how strict you want it to be. That may need to be tweaked with each individual organization. SpamTitan gives you a baseline of sensitivity to start with, and that number may need to be adjusted for your organization.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
Surya Prakash Nayak - PeerSpot reviewer
Director-IT at Cambridge Technology Enterprises (CTE)
Real User
Dec 8, 2022
Improves efficiency, saves time, and has flexible licensing options
Pros and Cons
  • "We are satisfied with the performance and spam filtering provided by TitanHQ SpamTitan. The reporting feature and customizations as per our requirements are also good."
  • "We are using the data center version with a dedicated server. It would be more user-friendly if SpamTitan were centralized. That is, TitanHQ should have a SaaS model for SpamTitan."

What is our primary use case?

We use TitanHQ to provide email security. It sits on Office 365 and protects all emails coming into our domain and going out of our domain.

How has it helped my organization?

We have been able to reduce the spam count and the number of phishing attacks, which were higher before we started using SpamTitan. Our reputation has also improved because our internal and external clients are happy with the level of protection provided by this solution.

What is most valuable?

We are satisfied with the performance and spam filtering provided by TitanHQ SpamTitan. The reporting feature and customizations as per our requirements are also good.

We use SpamTitan's geo-blocking feature to block spam emails entering our network and servers. We have created rules to block certain emails, and the geo-blocking feature has reduced our spam intake by 100%. 

I would give a ten out of ten for the geo-blocking feature for restricting emails from specific destinations based on IP or country.

Our employees don't have to sort through junk and spam emails now, which saves time. Also, they have the option to release and whitelist emails that have been placed in the quarantine folder. It's a user-level feature. It has substantially improved our efficiency by 70% to 80%.

What needs improvement?

We are using the data center version with a dedicated server. It would be more user-friendly if SpamTitan were centralized. That is, TitanHQ should have a SaaS model for SpamTitan.

For how long have I used the solution?

We've been using this solution for two years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

SpamTitan's stability is good; I'd rate it at eight out of ten. In comparison, I'd rate the stability of Trend Micro and Microsoft ATP at six or seven out of ten.

How are customer service and support?

TitanHQ's technical support staff respond quickly to our emails, and they've had the right level of expertise to handle our concerns or issues. I'd give them an eight out of ten.

Trend Micro's technical support is at the same level as that of SpamTitan, whereas Microsoft's technical support is at a lower level. We have experienced delays with Microsoft.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We previously used Trend Micro and Microsoft ATP. SpamTitan has the edge over Microsoft ATP because it is more user-friendly. Microsoft ATP was very complicated to configure, but SpamTitan can be customized for our own requirements.

What about the implementation team?

SpamTitan helped us to deploy the solution, and they maintain it as well.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

SpamTitan has competitive pricing and flexible licensing. They allow up to 10% more that you use and then add it to the next tier of licenses.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We evaluated Trend Micro and Symantec email security and chose SpamTitan because it is user-friendly and cheaper than the other two products.

What other advice do I have?

I would recommend SpamTitan and rate it at eight on a scale from one to ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
Rick Shepard - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at RCI Systems
Real User
Aug 1, 2022
Users can customize the emails they get and the emails they block, saving me time
Pros and Cons
  • "It gives our users the chance to interact with the program. They can decide if there are things that are junk mail that they don't want to be messing with, on an individual basis. Of course, I can always override that or control it from a company standpoint."
  • "In some ways, it was nice SonicWall did fail because we have a better solution now."
  • "From a small business point of view—we're 30 people—there should be a price break before you have 500 people. Small businesses don't have a lot of money."

What is our primary use case?

We use it for spam filtering.

How has it helped my organization?

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

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

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

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

What is most valuable?

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

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

For how long have I used the solution?

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

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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

How are customer service and support?

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

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

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

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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

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

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

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

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

How was the initial setup?

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

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

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

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

What was our ROI?

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

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

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

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

What other advice do I have?

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

Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
George Kajaia - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of IT Infrastructure Group, IT Operations Department at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Jul 29, 2022
Work hours are not lost searching through spam emails to determine which emails are legitimate
Pros and Cons
  • "We have a lot less spam going through. Because of this, work hours are not lost searching through all the spam emails to determine which ones are legitimate. This saves our bank clients' time since they are not forced to search their inbox for legitimate emails between spams. Not a lot of spam is going through. I think time is essential and we are gaining a lot of it with this solution since a lot of emails are automatically filtered out."
  • "From a price-performance ratio, it is one of the best; it does not cost a lot and does its job just fine, and if you fine tune it, it is just ideal."
  • "I would like to implement a secondary delivery pool for mass mailings, having an alternate pool for mass mailing lists since there is only a single mail queue with SpamTitan. For example, if 10,000 emails are being sent, then the queue will be large. Unfortunately, without a secondary delivery pool, legitimate emails will wait in the queue to be delivered to my email. Therefore, I would like to have two queues: one for everyday emails and another for mass mailings. Now, I have to decide whether to buy a second SpamTitan license just for this reason because I am very satisfied with the functionality of SpamTitan overall and don't want to use another sender's appliance for this."
  • "The phishing rate of SpamTitan is not great, even Exchange Online Protection catches phishing better than SpamTitan."

What is our primary use case?

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

How has it helped my organization?

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

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

What is most valuable?

It is easy to work with.

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

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

What needs improvement?

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

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

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

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

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

For how long have I used the solution?

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

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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

How are customer service and support?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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

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

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

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

How was the initial setup?

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

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

What about the implementation team?

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

What was our ROI?

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

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

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

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

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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

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

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

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

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

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

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

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

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

What other advice do I have?

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

We are not yet using the geo-blocking feature.

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

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user

About 6 years ago I got hit with at least 70 emails per day. It was part of a scheme to disrupt my regular office duties while the scammer fraudulently purchased over $10, 000 items using my debit card. 

With the help of an IT professional, he recommended Titan-HQ.  It worked like magic and the spam was gone. Even the questionable email goes to a quarantine folder where I am able to release the email I choose.

Titan-HQ sends me every morning a list of quarantined email which makes it so easy to use. Lastly, whenever I had to contact customer service they responded immediately and answered my questions. 

Benjamin Jeffrey - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of IT at M&M Golf Cars
Real User
Sep 25, 2023
We can block entire domains and subdomains with a click, and reduced junk mail saves time of every employee
Pros and Cons
  • "They have something called Pattern Filtering, which has been a godsend... 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."
  • "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."

What is our primary use case?

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.

How has it helped my organization?

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.

What is most valuable?

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.

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

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

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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.

How are customer service and support?

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.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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.

How was the initial setup?

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.

What was our ROI?

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.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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.

What other advice do I have?

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.

Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
reviewer2024106 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT manager at Ballin
Real User
Dec 8, 2022
Having to sort through junk email was becoming a problem, but most of our users rarely get spam now
Pros and Cons
  • "The spam filtering is the most valuable part. When we first started using it, 15 years ago, there weren't many solutions that worked well, were user-friendly, and powerful."
  • "SpamTitan doesn't allow you to customize the time reports are sent. Sometimes our users would prefer that it come at a certain time, like 7:00 am so they can make sure they didn't miss anything from the day before. Currently, it can come in the middle of the day and probably depends on the server's restart or the setting change."

What is our primary use case?

It's the only product we use for filtering spam and viruses, et cetera.

How has it helped my organization?

The fact that it blocks most of the spam—and about 75 percent of all emails coming in is spam—is a great help. We still have some spam emails that pass through because they are more and more complex, but when we need help to configure the solution, TitanHQ is always there to help with an issue that we may have.

It definitely helps save employees' time. Having to sort through junk email was becoming a problem. Most of our users rarely get spam now. We also don't have to worry about them deleting something that is valid because. When you have too much junk, you may also delete stuff that is not junk.

What is most valuable?

The spam filtering is the most valuable part. When we first started using it, 15 years ago, there weren't many solutions that worked well, were user-friendly, and powerful.

What needs improvement?

We do have a few users, like the president of our organization, whose email address is everywhere, who still get some spam and we can't really block it because it's always coming from different addresses.

Also, it's a bit complex, but if you want a lot of features, it has to be kind of complex, and they have good support. When you can't find something, they help you to find it.

SpamTitan doesn't allow you to customize the time reports are sent. Sometimes our users would prefer that it come at a certain time, like 7:00 am so they can make sure they didn't miss anything from the day before. Currently, it can come in the middle of the day and probably depends on the server's restart or the setting change.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using SpamTitan for at least 15 years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability is very good. We have never had any issues with its stability.

We used previous solutions a long time ago, but the stability of SpamTitan versus them is better because, now, everything is virtual. At that time, most solutions were on-premises, but SpamTitan had the virtual appliance from the beginning, so it was better. Getting email is one of the most important things for our company.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The scalability is very good too. You just need licenses for the number of users that you have.

How are customer service and support?

I have contacted their technical support several times. They're very good.

I don't have a competing solution, but their support is very good compared to the support we get for other products, who have their support based in India. It's definitely better. They always know what they're talking about and they provide a quick response. Even if it's something that you are doing wrong, they don't just try to close the case, they try to resolve your issue.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We used a free product and we also used a Norton product for some time, but it wasn't working as well as SpamTitan does. It was a consultant who worked for us who told me about the product and I tried it and it was definitely better than all the other ones that we tried before.

SpamTitan delivered performance and the price was quite good. I haven't compared it recently, and the price has increased in recent years, but the price and performance, at the time, were the key factors.

How was the initial setup?

The initial deployment was pretty easy. The fact that it's easy to install was only of average importance when deciding to use the solution. I do everything regarding IT in our organization. If it's complex, it's still only going to be installed once, and then you just update it. There isn't much maintenance or involvement with it and we don't need a lot of people to know the solution.

What about the implementation team?

I did it myself.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

For the service, the pricing is reasonable.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We don't use other solutions so we can't really compare.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
reviewer2025309 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of Technology at a performing arts with 201-500 employees
Real User
Dec 8, 2022
Has a simple process for end users to encrypt emails but does not have an easy way to deal with false positives
Pros and Cons
  • "The encryption feature seems to be the most useful. We didn't have a convenient option for it previously, and having the capability to encrypt from within the message nearly seamlessly is a benefit to us."
  • "With SpamTitan, the false positives and false negatives seem to be higher than those with the product we had previously. The other area for improvement has to do with how to deal with false positives. If something slips through, there's no easy way to mark it as spam globally. The add-in has not been working. We haven't even deployed it to our entire organization yet because it's not working for the few in the pilot project."

What is most valuable?

The encryption feature seems to be the most useful. We didn't have a convenient option for it previously, and having the capability to encrypt from within the message nearly seamlessly is a benefit to us.

EncryptTitan's Keyword Policy Based Encryption feature is one of the features we were looking for. We wanted a simple process for our end users so that they could encrypt emails and attachments. The other option we had before used multiple steps in order to achieve the same result.

What needs improvement?

With SpamTitan, the false positives and false negatives seem to be higher than those with the product we had previously.

The other area for improvement has to do with how to deal with false positives. If something slips through, there's no easy way to mark it as spam globally. The add-in has not been working. We haven't even deployed it to our entire organization yet because it's not working for the few in the pilot project.

For how long have I used the solution?

We've been using SpamTitan for almost a year now.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Stability-wise, it's pretty consistent. It has not gone down, although we had to have the instance restarted once. The stability of our previous email security solution was about the same as that of SpamTitan.

How are customer service and support?

I'm not happy with the technical support. Issues seem to drag on longer than they should, and we have no direct phone contact with support staff. Everything is handled through email, which is not really efficient in some situations and prevents the problem from being resolved faster.

In comparison, the technical support from AppRiver was much faster in terms of service responses. The products that we had before AppRiver were from GFI MailEssentials, and they were very responsive and had phone support so that we could directly talk to someone.

Overall, I would rate technical support at five on a scale from one to ten.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Neutral

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We previously used AppRiver. The primary reasons we chose SpamTitan are that it was a more modern product and that it offered encryption. On paper, it also looked like SpamTitan had more features than AppRiver.

SpamTitan built a solution for us and tested it out, and it seemed to work fine. That's why we went with it.

How was the initial setup?

The level of complexity of the initial setup was not beyond what we expected because we were deploying a lot of options. We had good support, and it was not difficult to set up and configure SpamTitan. We definitely wanted to be able to deploy the solution as quickly as possible.

We have one person assigned to handle the maintenance of the solution.

SpamTitan is deployed organization-wide. We're very regional, so we don't have other entities outside of our location.

What about the implementation team?

We worked directly with SpamTitan. I did the backend configuration, integrating it with our Office 365 tenant, and my colleague was responsible for the Outlook plugin, which is still an issue.

What was our ROI?

Encryption has definitely filled a gap that we needed, and it's a return on investment. 

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The pricing was a little bit below the average of what we were looking at.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We evaluated Proofpoint, Barracuda, Trustify, and Kaseya. We chose to go with SpamTitan because of the encryption option and the supposed modern email security options.

What other advice do I have?

If you are evaluating SpamTitan, I would advise you to take a look at the service options for problem resolution.

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

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Private Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
reviewer1414572 - PeerSpot reviewer
DevOps Director at University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics
Real User
Aug 29, 2022
A highly flexible, configurable, and stable solution with outstanding customer support
Pros and Cons
  • "The solution keeps a copy of inbound and outbound messages for a period, which is a handy feature. It makes it easier to determine precisely what is happening with an email, where it came from, why it isn't routing correctly, why it is or isn't being flagged etc. If an end user forwards us a problematic email, the header information can be lost, making it harder to figure out what's happening."
  • "SpamTitan is an excellent product; the only issue is with the UI, which is somewhat dated."
  • "The interface needs to be improved; some elements aren't where I expect them to be, so it could be more intuitive."

What is our primary use case?

Our primary use case is as a secure email gateway; the solution scans our emails for spam and viruses and does URL link rewriting. SpamTitan makes sure our incoming and outgoing emails don't contain anything problematic.

How has it helped my organization?

Before implementing the solution, I had 13,000 to 14,000 sitting in my Deleted Items folder on 90 day rolling average. The figure after implementing SpamTitan is 8,000 to 9,000 items in my Deleted Items folder on a 90 day rolling average, so it's stopping thousands of emails that got through before.

We are part of a larger University organization, and many spam emails come from the broader organization. They run Office 365, and there is spam it doesn't catch, despite user reporting. SpamTitan filters out the emails Office 365 misses, for the most part, as no solution is 100% effective all the time.

What is most valuable?

SpamTitan is flexible and highly configurable. 

The solution keeps a copy of inbound and outbound messages for a period, which is a handy feature. It makes it easier to determine precisely what is happening with an email, where it came from, why it isn't routing correctly, why it is or isn't being flagged etc. If an end user forwards us a problematic email, the header information can be lost, making it harder to figure out what's happening.

Geo-blocking is a great feature. It's simple, and it works; we pick a country, and the tool blocks mail from that country. There isn't a list of countries to select from, we have to type in the country name, and it brings up matches, which is a little cumbersome, but it still works quite well. The feature is good to have, but we don't see a massive influx of emails being blocked. 

A huge feature for us is the link rewriting configuration; we can set exemptions for link rewriting from particular organizations. The rest are rewritten and checked against the SpamTitan database of problematic sites and email sources. The user is notified of the outcome of the check, which is excellent when it's hard to determine if an email is legitimate or not.   

The solution saves employees' time. Many of our faculty are physicians who don't have much time to check their emails, especially if they need to scroll through and delete spam mail, which can hide important messages. A cleaner inbox is easier to use and saves time, probably an hour a week per user. That might not sound like much, but we had physicians with inboxes so full of spam they stopped checking their emails, which is no longer the case. Our catch rate is up significantly, and our false positives have dropped considerably, saving the end user time.

What needs improvement?

The interface needs to be improved; some elements aren't where I expect them to be, so it could be more intuitive. 

The solution isn't intuitive enough for me to go in and write specific rules and exemptions.

For how long have I used the solution?

We have been using the solution for about nine months. 

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability is excellent. We filter 45,000 to 50,000 emails a week through the solution and haven't had any server issues. Physically rebooting the primary server causes a failure to the backup server, which is how it is supposed to work, the stability is solid.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The solution is highly scalable and easy to scale. The appliances are straightforward to get up and running and to add to the system. A few clicks and checks are all that's required.

How are customer service and support?

The customer service is outstanding. If I have a question, I can open a ticket, and they usually get back to me within hours. They can also remote in if I turn on remote access, so they can fix what needs to be fixed or tell us what we need to do to resolve our issue. Their support is fantastic.

I can send TitanHQ a ticket with the information of a rule that requires updating and provide them remote access to our system via a code. Usually, within 24 hours, their rule post developer will have come in and provided a solution for us, which is incredible.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We previously used GFI MailEssentials, but it wasn't being updated. It was almost two years since their last update. They updated their filters and virus database regarding the software, but that's it. We saw an increase in spam getting through, and my team and I spent more time releasing false positives. GFI didn't work well in our multi-exchange server environment and didn't perform as we expected.

We looked for another solution, did a POC with SpamTitan, found it impressive and decided to implement it. One of our requirements was an on-prem option due to HIPPA regulations regarding information sharing, which narrowed the selection down. Another requirement was a solution that sits in front of the email as a gateway. This further limited the selection, and SpamTitan was the natural choice.

How was the initial setup?

The deployment is very straightforward. TitanHQ provided a knowledgeable staff member to support our deployment, and it was clear he was very experienced and wonderful to work with. He was patient and made an excellent first impression. The initial setup required two people, myself and the staff member from TitanHQ, and it didn't take long. We set up two appliances and a failover solution, which we did over three separate meetings of an hour each during the first month of the POC. By the end of the month, I was ready to purchase, and no further setup was required.

The solution is very lightweight in terms of maintenance, we've had one major update over nine months, and that was a click of a button to download and install. We can set updates to auto-install, and the minor updates, including antivirus definitions, happen by themselves. TitanHQ puts a lot of effort into maintaining SpamTitan on their end.

What was our ROI?

I don't have any precise numbers, but I would say the product provides an ROI. An intangible ROI is decreasing the footprint for a phishing or some sort of email related security attack.  By doing such a good job of weeding out the bad messages we reduce the number of potentially harmful messages making it to the users inbox.  We train our users on how to spot spam messages, but that is not full proof.  By significantly catching more spam messages and rewriting the hyperlinks this has further reduced the chances of someone mistakenly interacting with a bad message.  Thus increasing our security foot print.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The pricing is very reasonable. I know the cloud version costs more because of active 24/7 monitoring, but we take care of that as our setup is on-prem. SpamTitan is in line with what we were paying for GFI MailEssentials but works much better.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

I don't remember what other solutions I considered. The person I worked with from TitanHQ was fantastic; they helped me with the POC and any information and advice I needed. That was one of the main reasons I didn't dig much further into other solutions.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate SpamTitan a nine out of ten. 

Typically, we don't see large amounts of spam stopped by geo-blocking, but we have the feature activated for a few countries, the major players. 

We don't use the geo-blocking exemptions feature because we block the whole country at this point; we don't have business dealings with other countries.

SpamTitan is an excellent product; the only issue is with the UI, which is somewhat dated. TitanHQ is working on updating it, however. I would advise users not to be discouraged by the UI because the solution works well; it's a solid option.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Download our free TitanHQ SpamTitan Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
Updated: August 2026
Buyer's Guide
Download our free TitanHQ SpamTitan Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.