TitanHQ SpamTitan Reviews

We're a relatively small company, and SpamTitan provides our spam filtering solution. I have 16 email boxes out there right now, including individual email addresses and generic email addresses for sales, customer service, etc. Outside of the normal SpamTitan features, we don't use any other TitanHQ products or any other features aside from filtering and reporting.

To be honest, it wasn't much of an improvement over Barracuda except for the price point. Barracuda had more granularity as far as how deep I could dig. I think that had more to do with the fact that we had the appliance on-site, so it gave me more features. 

On the other hand, SpamTitan is effortless to manage and administer. They do a lot more behind the scenes, so I can't access the configuration. However, I honestly don't think I needed most of the configuration options that I had with Barracuda. A lot of that was overkill. I can understand where some companies might need more of it, but it was absolutely fine for our needs. 

Spam filtering, in general, is a big time saver. We've had a spam filter for many years now. I think we originally bought Barracuda in 2005 or 2006. The difference between having a spam filter and not having one is night and day. Our CEO was getting upwards of about 600 emails per day, and that went down to around 40. He was pleased with the results we got from Barracuda. SpamTitan maintained that performance. The amount of unwanted emails is minimal compared to what we see in our reports.

SpamTitan probably saves hours of time. It also prevents employees from missing important emails because they have become desensitized to them. Spam makes email less effective as a communications tool. You stop looking at your email when all you get is junk all the time. 

I don't get much employee feedback about spam filtering, but there were some new features when we switched to SpamTitan. For example, Barracuda wouldn't give you a report, but SpamTitan sends a daily individual report to each user identifying questionable emails in quarantine and asking them if they want to allow them. 

It took a couple of days to get everyone trained and on board with how it worked. Nobody complains or says anything about it. Occasionally, someone misses an email they're expecting, and I have to show them that the email might be in quarantine. The impacts are minimal. 

We get reports on blocked emails. I review them weekly to see who the heavy hitters are inside the office. We need our email addresses out there to do business, so we have sales and customer service email addresses that need to be out there. Those are the biggest targets for spam. SpamTitan cuts down the amount of spam that we receive, but it's about the same as Barracuda. 

Initially, I had some issues where we were getting emails coming in that appeared to come in from our own internal domain. My company is called M2 Systems, so our domain name is M2-corp.com. I had to get on with support twice to get them to help me mitigate or block that from happening. 

On Barracuda, it was much easier to click a switch or a button to disallow this. It was more my unfamiliarity, but I think they could make it a little easier to keep the origination from looking like it comes from the internal domain.

We started in June 2020, so we've been a SpamTitan customer for around two years.

I rate SpamTitan 10 out of 10.

SpamTitan is scalable. It comes into their systems, but it all filters. We only have a single mail server, and everybody retrieves mail from there. I can't personally speak to its scalability because we're not large enough to really have other offices or anything like that. However, if we were to add a hundred more users, the only aspect that I assume would change would be the pricing model. We would go to a higher level because we'd have more mailboxes to filter.

I rate TitanHQ support 10 out of 10. They responded quickly. TitanHQ has a separate portal for issues that are unrelated to administering the SpamTitan environment. I showed them what we were seeing and asked why we were seeing this. They explained the issue well, and we got it fixed.

We had a Barracuda spam firewall model 200 that was up for renewal. You have to renew the license annually to keep the product up to date. It was on the pricey side already, and they had increased the price by about 30-40%. 

My company only had about 25 mailboxes that needed protection at the time, so the cost was out of line with what we were thinking. We did a one-month evaluation of SpamTitan and found that it met our needs as well as Barracuda.

The fact that we didn't need to buy hardware was one deciding factor. This is a hosted product, so we only needed to point our DNS to their mail system and have our mail server retrieve it from them. In terms of integration, the pain was minimal. We just made a couple of DNS entries. I liked Barracuda as a product. The problem was the pricing was getting excessive for the amount of coverage we need. 

I was involved throughout the whole setup. I'm the only IT person here and have been since about 2017. Setting up SpamTitan is straightforward. I had no issues with the evaluation phase or the final production conversion. 

You point to their server and retrieve the email from there. After that, I had to inform our users that we were switching from Barracuda to SpamTitan. There might be a 30-minute disruption in the email services. It was easy to switch. Aside from a few minor issues, we had no problems whatsoever. It doesn't require any maintenance aside from changing the internal settings so that we don't get external emails that look like it's coming from us.

We see a return from not having to deal with spam on our inbound emails. It absolutely pays for us to have this.

I'm pleased with the pricing. We're happy with their licensing model. It was a major factor in why we chose them. The ease of use and conversion were the other two. 

Aside from the domain origination issue, everything else has worked fantastically. I don't have any complaints about them at all. The price was what we expected to pay, given the number of users that we had.

I had a few different products suggested to me, and SpamTitan was one of them.

I rate SpamTitan 10 out of 10. The only aspect you need to know is how to administer an email in a DNS system. An inexperienced IT person could do this without issue. 

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.

Our primary use case is filtering incoming emails.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have been using TitanHQ SpamTitan for approximately five years.

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

We have not rebooted our server for five years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

I work for a city government, and SpamTitan provides front-end protection for any incoming email. It scans for viruses or any malware that comes across the email. I also block some countries using geoblocking features in the software. 

For example, since we don't do business with China, we block any emails coming from there because most of them try to do something malicious. 

SpamTitan has led to a tremendous reduction in spam intake. Employees will enter their email when registering for a website, which gets sold off to a million places. 

Since we implemented the solution in 2018, about 74 percent of our messages have come in clean, so 26 percent were spam or other rejected emails. That equals about 2 million clean messages and 600,000 emails that were geoblocked, flagged as spam, or otherwise rejected because of viruses or bad attachments.

SpamTitan has also improved our catch rate and reduced false positives relative to our previous solution. It's hard to say how much because I wasn't in that area of operations at the time, so I wasn't involved with our previous spam solution. 

I'm not sure if it was a configuration issue, but the catch rate was probably the opposite. In other words, three-quarters of the mail coming through was spam and only a quarter was clean. 

Implementing SpamTitan made our operations a lot more efficient because the users have accounts and can check for spam. If it's a false positive, they can release it and get the email. With the old system, they had to go to two different spam portals. It was convoluted, and I don't think too many people have used it.

It's hard for me to quantify the amount of time our employees save. I don't have those statistics. However, it saves time if your inbox isn't filled with spam. You don't need to waste time filtering through the junk. The city's communications through email have become a great deal more efficient, but I don't have statistics to back that up.

Our security has improved, as well. A virus hit the entire city government, and we believe the infection came through email. We reevaluated our products after that. We changed our antivirus and firewalls and switched our spam solution to SpamTitan. We changed almost every security product that we had to something better.

TitanSpam's security features keep malicious occurrences from coming, and the spam features prevent all the garbage from coming into our inboxes. And the geoblocking helps us automatically block email from regions we don't do business with.

The user interface is also highly user-friendly. I didn't know much about this system when we got it in 2018, but I could easily navigate it. It's intuitive and straightforward with tabs, so you can access the settings you need to get to. 

They also let you customize it to match your organization's feel, so it looks like a product from your organization. I like when companies do that. Our city logo is on it when you log in to this system. 

After we configured SpamTitan to our liking, it pretty much took care of itself. It even provides spam scores on all the emails that come in. You can determine the highest score you want to allow. 

SpamTitan's logging features could be improved. The logs are hard to deal with because you need to download the log as a text file. Then you need to search through this text file to find what you need. 

At the same time, I don't have too many problems, so I don't have to look in the logs that often. It doesn't bother me that much, but it would help if I could view these logs in a more user-friendly way.

We've been using SpamTitan since 2018.

SpamTitan is extremely stable. I've never had this system go down.

I would say that SpamTitan is highly scalable. I can see memory and CPU usage on the dashboard, and we have more than enough hardware to scale out as high as we need. I know they have packages with a lot more users than we deal with. We're running on about 500 users, but I don't think we would have a problem scaling from there. We don't have too much use for more. We only have about 900 employees here.

Many city employees don't use their official email accounts that much. For example, we have public works people out on the streets who hardly use email. My license usage went over the limit a few times, but it's not much. I think it's only 50 or 60 users.

I rate TitanHQ's support eight out of 10. They're highly knowledgeable about the product they have produced and resolve issues fairly quickly. I've had one or two issues in four years that required them to do something on their end. 

They have remote support, so they can access the private cloud. I can enable remote support, so they can connect to it, look at the issue, and resolve it remotely. It's top-notch support. We've never had a problem with them. Everything gets resolved as quickly as possible.

I never had to deal with support for GFI MailEssentials, but I know that people in those positions struggled with their support at times, so I would say SpamTitan's customer service is much better than competitors.

Positive

We were using another product called GFI MailEssentials, and the difference between SpamTitan is like night and day. We had all kinds of malware go into our inboxes, so we needed to sift through it to get to the real meat of the issue.

We function better with this product because we don't have any downtime. We haven't had any virus infections since implementing SpamTitan. We took a massive hit with GFI MailEssentials, and it took our entire network down. We had to rebuild everything manually, so we did a lot of research to find a better solution. This is what we landed on after months of research.

The deployment was relatively fast. It took a little bit of time to spin up the private cloud and around a week to deploy SpamTitan. I'd say it took about two weeks from start to finish.

The maintenance and configuration are straightforward. I configured this solution back in 2018, so it's been close to four years. I do updates and other tweaks periodically. I might change some allowlists, but it requires little involvement after the setup. It pretty much runs itself.

I worked directly with SpamTitan and implemented the solution.

We've definitely seen a return. When that security incident happened in 2017, I can't even tell you how much that cost us. There was a lot of downtime. I'm sure it was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. SpamTitan costs less than $5,000 a year. It's worth it to keep us out of those situations.

We pay around $4,200 for a license, so it doesn't come out to that much per user. It's about $8.40 per user annually. You just can't beat that. I don't know if people negotiate that down further, but TitanHQ tried to raise the price on me after we had been using this solution for a year or two. 

I told them we had already budgeted for the amount we've been paying for the past two years, so they agreed to keep the price the same. Maybe a customer could haggle for a better deal, but I think that's a pretty good price to protect one user from spam and viruses for a year.

I rate SpamTitan nine out of 10. I recommend trying it out. TitanHQ will work with you. I can't remember if I did a trial beforehand, but I know there were talks about spinning up a private cloud that we could try for 30 days. If they're willing to let you try it for a month, there's really nothing to lose. You can move on if you don't like it, and if you do, the solution's already in place, so you can start scaling it out.

In general, it's always good advice to research security products to make sure you have the best solution for your environment in place. Also, you need to make sure your products are up to date. Security updates are essential, and you should double-check your configurations. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

It's a no-brainer for me. It has 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We're an MSP providing IT services and we host mail servers in Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates.

We host SpamTitan behind a firewall, and the SpamTitan appliances talk to a first load balancer. The load balancer directs the traffic to our mail servers which are still in the DMZ. After the Edge servers, they redirect the mail flow to our internal firewalls. From these firewalls, we go to another load balancer and the backend infrastructure, where we have our mailboxes.

As a SpamTitan MSP, several aspects of TitanHQ's technology help us acquire new customers and add value to our services and product offerings. These include the anti-spam efficiency, the efficiency of the antivirus engine included in the product, and the self-service user quarantine. Since deploying the tool, we have had almost no viruses, and the malware detection is excellent. 

TitanHQ works hard to provide the best service, which can be challenging as client service is an art, but they have made many improvements recently. They're always seeking client feedback regarding support services, which we appreciate. They're constantly developing new features, some become premium, and some they offer for free, such as anti-phishing features. TitanHQ recently developed a new feature called Link Lock, which our clients appreciated and even convinced some prospective clients to join, as that's a selling point for us as an anti-spam product.    

The most significant benefit of being a TitanHQ partner is that they care about how they provide:

• Services.
• The efficiency of their services.
• The quality of the client experience.

In terms of real, tangible benefits for our clients, by upgrading to SpamTitan, we were able to reverse the trend of dissatisfaction in our customer base. It changed the quality of our services for the better.   

SpamTitan spares a significant amount of employee time and effort by not having to sort through spam and junk emails. The end-user quarantine mailbox and the self-service portal offered to every end-user through a web portal are convenient and time-saving features. Users can access their quarantines and decide to whitelist, block, or blacklist emails, which frees up our service desk team. The time we spend going through junk and spam emails dramatically decreased by around 40-50% compared to our old solution, and our service desk team is now happy with our infrastructure services. It used to be a nightmare with our old provider. 

We've also seen a dramatic improvement in our spam catch rate and a reduction in false positives since implementing SpamTitan. Our clients' main criticism of us was the lack of flexibility in the previous anti-spam solution we used. Now we have flexibility, transparency, and efficiency, which all matter to our clients and us.

All the features are valuable; mail security isn't about one feature but rather a collection of features. The good thing about SpamTitan is its versatility because it offers every feature we need. They're not always easy to implement, but we have access to the entire suite required by an MSP like us to provide the best service possible to our clients. We appreciate that, and everything we could wish for regarding email security is included in the product.

The standout features include the anti-phishing feature, which is particularly advantageous as far as our clients are concerned; it was a very welcome addition for many of them. 

The ability to do mail sandboxing before delivering and receiving emails for antivirus and anti-malware detection is excellent.

The double antivirus and anti-malware engine utilizing Clam AntiVirus and Bitdefender, plus all the standard security processes, including anti-spoofing detection, DKIM, and business email compromise (BEC) features, make for a robust security profile. We appreciate these features, and they all work very well.

The quarantine report frequency could be better. 

Sometimes we have specific concerns and requests for TitanHQ that their product can't currently cater to because it's not designed for it. We are often told this will be included in the roadmap. Still, we need visibility on when it will be deployed, when a requested feature will become available, or even tested. More transparency on this front would be a big plus.

We've been using SpamTitan for a little over three years. 

The solution is stable and reliable; we never had an issue regarding operational stability and service access. We only had third-party issues or problems related to our infrastructure services.

The solution is scalable; we run it as a virtual machine, so we have the associated flexibility. As long as we pay for them, we can add as many nodes as we need. We never had to worry about scaling the product.

We currently have around 1,500 end users. 

The technical support is responsive and client-oriented; they care about the client. They listen to client complaints and continually work to improve their services, so we are very satisfied. The support isn't ideal or perfect, and in some cases, we weren't completely satisfied, but TitanHQ always tries to do better based on our feedback.

Comparing SpamTitan's customer support team versus our previous solution, it's night and day, which is one of the reasons we switched to them. SpamTitan changed our lives as an MSP in terms of mail security.  

When we open tickets with them, we know they will help us in a timely and efficient way, which gives us peace of mind. This wasn't the case with our previous solution; we always chased technicians for a working solution and feedback. With TitanHQ, it's the other way around; they chase us for feedback, and they're concerned with the quality and relevance of their support. They care about the client experience, and that's great.

Positive

We previously used Broadcom SMG and switched because we were unsatisfied with the product. We had a lot of false positives and spam getting through, so we wanted to improve our situation significantly. We met with a SpamTitan sales team, who were very convincing. We agreed that we needed their product and implemented the on-prem solution.

As I'm the Infrastructure Manager, I was involved in the deployment, and we were surprised by how easy the deployment was. TitanHQ has a very well-done online wiki, which made the setup elementary. The initial deployment took a few days, and the most challenging part was to cut over from our old solution without impacting our clients and end users. Aside from that, the deployment was a breeze.

We finalized the agreement on the licensing, downloaded the SpamTitan images as we were running VMware as a hypervisor, deployed the images, made the network configurations, and double-checked that they were correctly done. We then started testing the mail flow, and when this was conclusive, we started the client migration. I carried out the deployment alone for the most part, with one other employee to double-check the setup, which is our company policy for deploying a new product.

The only maintenance required is part of a lifecycle management process we have as a company, in which we're required to check for obsolete hardware and software revisions regularly. SpamTitan is no exception, and it's very straightforward; we check if there's a software update available through a GUI, and if there is, we take a snapshot as we're running a virtual machine. We back up with our backup solution as an additional safety layer and go through the upgrade; it's an ideal process.

We have a considerable ROI; we lost clients with our previous tool, whereas now we have expanded our client base and are getting prospective clients because we have a reliable solution.

The price is quite advantageous; we were initially surprised at the pricing compared to other solutions, which made us doubt if this was the solution for us. Then, we discovered SpamTitan's features and how cost-effective it is. The sales team does an excellent job making our life easier in terms of pricing, which is another significant advantage of this product.

We evaluated MailCleaner and a more expensive solution, Cisco Secure Email, which we didn't find cost-effective. We made a product comparison and decided to go with SpamTitan, and we don't regret our choice.

I rate the solution eight out of ten. 

TitanHQ's key differentiator for its partners is the level of support services; they're fast, responsive, efficient, and care about client satisfaction. That's the main differentiator, plus the fact that their product is constantly evolving with new features.   

We don't use the solution's geo-blocking feature because we are not convinced by IP-based blocking instead of location-based. We know geolocation based on a GPS location is challenging, and very few providers offer it, but the current state of IP-based geolocation features is not a requirement for us or our client base.

TitanHQ needs to continue surveying us for client satisfaction regarding their support services, as that's important to us. We appreciate it when they send us emails from time to time asking about our opinion or satisfaction. We also appreciate how they get back to us when a new feature becomes available that could help us improve our services, so we want them to keep this up.

My advice to others evaluating SpamTitan is to refer to the excellent wiki hosted on the solution's website or contact the amazing, client-focused L2 and L3 staff, who are happy to answer any query.

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.

I'm the owner of a managed service provider. SpamTitan provides a front end for Office 365 for some of my customers. About three years ago, some of my clients came under an email attack, so I deployed an email filter from Barracuda. We used that for a few years before switching to SpamTitan. 

We offer SpamTitan as a solution to those who need it. I don't think everybody needs it. Office 365 does a decent job of filtering spam, but SpamTitan is easier to use and probably performs better for customers with significant spam problems. It's a 100% cloud solution, but it's not like we deploy it to AWS or Azure and integrate it into their cloud or anything. It's a turnkey solution.

As a TitanHQ partner, we reap some financial benefits from selling it. We have the ability to call the vendor to get problems resolved quickly and gain access to some of the other products they sell besides SpamTitan. They seem to be responsive and keep in touch with their partners via email.

I don't know if SpamTitan has saved our clients money because it's priced similarly to the other products we were using, but it has definitely saved them time. Receiving lots of spam is a problem so the less junk email the better from an end-user standpoint. 

It reduces email clutter, improving employee productivity. It does what it says it does. It reduces spam by quite a bit above and beyond the Office 365 built-in spam filter.  One aspect our clients liked about SpamTitan was the ability to easily see what was blocked. Previously, they had to log in and search for emails. If they didn't get something they were expecting, they would see it in the report the next day. They can click a button and restore it. That's the biggest productivity benefit.

I like the notifications SpamTitan sends. Other products require the user to log into the system to see if something was blocked. SpamTitan sends users an email showing them any potential spam that was blocked and they can click on it to release it. It's much easier for the end-user.

Another feature I like is SpamTitan's integration with Active Directory. With previous spam solutions, we had to add a new user into their system and the Active Directory separately, but this is integrated.

The report comes out every morning. If a valid email gets blocked, I won't know about it until the next morning unless I log into the system to check, but it's quite a bit of work. Some users have requested that they get the report more often than once a day. If someone booked an airline flight or something that's time-sensitive and it gets blocked, they wouldn't find out until the next day. By then, it's probably too late. They would like notifications more often than once daily.

I have used SpamTitan for around six months.

I rate SpamTitan 10 out of 10 for performance and stability. I've never had any problems. It just works.

I rate SpamTitan 10 out of 10 for scalability. If I need to put thousands of users on it, I just buy the licenses, and it'll work.

I rate TitanHQ support eight out of 10. I have called them a few times. They're responsive. They're probably in the top 75th percentile in terms of support. Microsoft Office also has great support. I could them pretty quickly without waiting. They seemed to be knowledgeable and solve my problems.

Positive

We previously used Barracuda, which we had purchased from another reseller, but they weren't doing much with that anymore. We decided to do market research and see what was out there. We did some demos of SpamTitan and found it was effective. It was easy to install and competitively priced, and so that's why we switched.

Setting up SpamTitan is pretty easy. Once you flip the switch, all your email is now routed to SpamTitan, then back to Office 365. Once it's configured and you turn it on, the email just flows through the system. 

An important part of the implementation was communicating with the users, telling them what we're doing, why we're doing it, and how the reporting works. Once it's configured, we don't need to do anything else with it. There are no upgrades, maintenance, or tweaking. We'll add some whitelists occasionally, but it's very low maintenance. 

There's an annual fee, and it's reasonable. I think the pricing is decent, and the customers don't balk at the price. It is a relatively small amount per user per year, so it's a pretty easy sell.

We looked at some other solutions but not with the same depth as we reviewed SpamTitan. After some preliminary research on the other ones, we decided to do a trial. We found it met all our needs, so we continued with it.

Compared to other products, SpamTitan was easier to install and integrate with Office 365. That was a real plus, but the biggest advantage for end users is the daily report each morning that shows all the blocked emails they can release themselves. 

I rate TitanHQ SpamTitan nine out of 10. I recommend trying it. They have a trial that's pretty easy to turn on. Test it out, and I think you'll like it.