TitanHQ SpamTitan Reviews

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.

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.

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.

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.

We have been using the solution for about nine months. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We use it for all our companies to essentially filter and secure our email. 

We have about eight companies who are using it, but they are all under one umbrella. It is one system the services multiple locations, so we access it internally through our corporate location where we have about 130 users who are licensed.

It is nice to have something in-between the Exchange Server. I can do maintenance on my server and still have everything coming through. For the most part, I trust the amount of spam that is being caught. It is very accurate, which is the best way to go. I think they claim 99% emails, or something like that, will be flagged. It is pretty close to that. I don't know if it is exactly 99%. However, for the most part and from what I have seen with other spam systems, it does a great job at trying to catch spam email. We have tweaked the rules over the years to help make it better for our business.

If it can stop all the garbage from getting through, then it is definitely a time saver. It is more about protecting our employees than anything. We just want to make sure that we can do everything that we can do to try and prevent people from clicking on bad stuff or having to deal with bad stuff. It is easier to prevent it from coming into the network.

The new Link Lock feature seems to help protect us a bit better than before. We have been pretty happy with it. The Link Lock feature is probably one of the better ones that can help better protect our end users. I know that they are still working on it, so there are some challenges here and there. However, for the most part, the features and functionality are pretty awesome.

It is pretty easy for us to use, add new features, and add licenses.

We use the geo-blocking feature to block by certain country domains. There are a chunk of regions that we just outright drop as soon as they hit the server. This reduces our spam intake by 5% to 10%.

We block .ru, because we have had a huge intake of spam as well as stuff from Japan. Since we don't do anything in those countries, there is no reason for us to be getting email from them. That is why we do it. We just don't have a need for emails to be coming in from those locations.

The geo-blocking feature is easy to use. Some of the users can waitlist. Then, on the admin side, we can also add stuff to completely allow a top-level domain, if we know that we are having some issues with them, and they haven't quite fixed their stuff. It is very easy to do that and use it.

One of the things that I have been asking them to do is add the ability to scan a domain's age. It seems like the majority of spam right now have been registered with brand new domains. They are utilizing and abusing them for two weeks until they make it onto all the blacklists, then they pick a new one. They just move on. So, if we could scan a domain's age, and just say, "Outright block domains that are less than two weeks old," then it would make SpamTitan even better. They absolutely should be doing that. I would love it if they would do that.

I have been an avid user for seven years.

My server has been running non-stop for 675 days. That is my up-time right now. It is very stable, running on a small cluster.

It is very lightweight on the maintenance side. I am in on a daily basis just to monitor it, but generally speaking, it takes care of itself. You don't really have to do a whole lot unless you encounter an issue.

I have seen that they offer MSP and ISP offerings, so I see no reason why it wouldn't be very scalable. However, I have not personally used its scalability.

The support is pretty fantastic when I have had to deal with them. They are easy to use and get in touch with. They resolve things pretty quickly. There are some things that they can do in the background, if their software can't exactly do what you are looking for; they can tweak and modify stuff for us.

I have only ever had one or two issues where I felt like I wasn't getting an appropriate answer, so I ended up opening a phone call ticket. I called in and spoke with somebody, then I was able to get a resolution pretty quickly once I voiced my concern with the solution that was provided.

We are very satisfied with the support. I would rate them as nine out of 10.

Positive

All this stuff was coming through Exchange and it wasn't cutting it as an anti-spam. So, we picked SpamTitan after reviewing a couple of different products. Our decision was mainly based on features and functionality as well as price point and flexibility. 

The initial deployment was straightforward.

It took the appropriate amount of effort to set up and configure. It would be nice if there was a bit more guidance in some of the stuff or maybe a hand-on approach for new customers. That might be a good idea. 

I did the setup by myself.

We set it up in-house. We just slowly tweaked things as we went along, opening a support ticket as need. Then, they would make recommendations based on our issue and tell me what I should or shouldn't be doing.

We have seen ROI. We continue to purchase it every year.

It has reduced our false positive rate by 90%.

The price point is still of a reasonable nature. It is reasonable for the services that they offer. They are very reasonable, and that is one of the factors why we decided on SpamTitan a long time ago.

We recently added on the new Link Lock license.

We also looked at Barracuda.

It is a great product for the price point that you are getting. It has a fantastic value. I would highly recommend it.

SpamTitan is an eight. It is very good. There are small points that they could improve, but they are good at what they do.

We have a business in which all of our users have email accounts. SpamTitan is an email gateway and it checks for spam, as the name implies, but it also checks for viruses and phishing emails to help stop them. We use it to help keep our company's email safe.

I get the same or even fewer number of requests from users about email, per month, and those requests have more to do with something having been quarantined, as opposed to whether something is a phishing email.

SpamTitan does a good job of grabbing all the newsletters and other things that come through. It saves a little bit of headache for our employees.

It has a quarantine bank where it keeps emails that it believes are spam so that users can access and retrieve them if need be, and say they're not spam.

It works as it should. It allows users to manage emails that they receive, meaning they can set up whitelists and blacklists. 

I have an administrative panel to globally add whitelist or blacklist entries. Also, if I need to look for an email that was quarantined because a user isn't sure how to access it, I have the ability to look into everyone's quarantine and take some kind of action on them, such as delivering them. We usually deliver them to the employee instead of them having to wait for the spam report.

The big issue that I've had is that the length of time that an email is kept in quarantine is only seven days and, in some cases, it is not even seven days. For example, on Monday this week, someone reported she had received some automated messages on Friday night. But by Monday, because it was a DMARC, she couldn't retrieve them and I couldn't find them either. It's great that it grabs things, but I wish that I could tune things more. Perhaps I could have a second quarantine area. Maybe users wouldn't need to access things older than seven days, but if I had a 20-day or 30-day repository, if someone came to me and said, "Hey, I can't get this back," I could end up getting it to them from the archive. 

That would make my life a lot easier because there have been a few times over the last year when someone has come to me and I said they haven't been able to retrieve an email because it had been simply deleted.

Even if it went into some type of cold storage, so it wouldn't cost much, it would give me a way to access them, if need be, even if it took 24 hours for me to access them.

Another feature that would be nice would be a button in Outlook to be able to report something as spam so that the system could learn. If an email doesn't get reported as spam and comes through, there's no way to tell it that it is spam. That type of button is important for that feedback because it improves the algorithm. They are working on a button but it still hasn't been implemented.

I have been using TitanHQ SpamTitan for a little over a year.

I haven't had any issues with the stability.

Their technical support is pretty good. I don't think I've had to wait more than half an hour or an hour for them to get back to me. They don't have live phone support, rather it's an email ticket system, but the nice thing is that you can look at any of your past tickets. So, if you run into an issue that you had before, it's pretty easy to do.

I haven't had to contact them that much except for when I have been trying to access an email that has been deleted, and there's not much they can do then. But overall, it just works.

Positive

The reason I looked into a gateway was that, in the same month, I received a number of questions about phishing emails, or emails with attachments. The people didn't know who they came from. Going with SpamTitan was one of a number of things I did to combat that.

We didn't have a previous solution, other than Microsoft's spam folder. That does an okay job for free, but it was not on this level.

I did the setup that makes SpamTitan the intermediary, so emails go to them first, and then to Office 365. The initial setup wasn't too difficult and if I had any questions, a sales engineer was there to help. She knew enough about the product to help me with any of the questions that I had.

The overall project included identifying the need, getting buy-in from the company, and then the search for potential suppliers. I had questions for all of them to figure out which one would be the best fit. Once we decided on SpamTitan, it was just a matter of looking over their instructions. They have a setup page on their website and they linked me to that.

The instructions could be changed a little bit. It took me a couple of takes to read through them because they have both onsite and cloud. There were a couple of settings that were a little bit unclear as to which one they were for, but you could eventually figure it out.

I did the setup myself. Once we purchased it, the installation was done within a day, including reading the instructions, going through the process, and then testing it afterward.

We renewed SpamTitan, so I think the company does see the benefit.

We're satisfied with the pricing and licensing for SpamTitan. They worked with us on that, because, fully staffed, we have around 110 people which would have required that we purchase 200 seats from them. But because we're a non-profit, they said 100 is fine, and if it fluctuates up or down, they're not going to hold us to it. They were really understanding about our issues with cost.

I looked at Barracuda, Mimecast, and a couple of others, but SpamTitan provided all the features that we needed, and it was cost-effective. The second choice would have been Barracuda, which had all of the features that we needed, plus a lot of the features that we wanted. SpamTitan couldn't provide everything that I wanted, but at least it handles the security part.

At this point, SpamTitan doesn't filter email between Office 365 users. It filters email that's coming in, but if somehow one of my clients gets a virus, it could be sent out to everyone in the company and that wouldn't go through SpamTitan. For example, if it's a Zero-day attack, SpamTitan may not know right off the top that it's a virus. The virus companies might not know yet that it's a Zero-day and it could get through. But Barracuda looks for suspicious activity in accounts that are sending emails to each other. If an account that doesn't normally blast emails out to everyone starts doing that with attachments, that will look fishy to Barracuda and it can stop it or identify it. That can help stop issues from happening.

That was one of the only things Barracuda does that spam Titan doesn't.

I'm not sure if it does a great job in terms of false positives, but it's easy to remedy if there are any. It doesn't happen that often, but I don't know if that's due to our users not going outside of our ecosystem that much, or something else. But, at least in the report section, you can see what the email scored, and that can give you an idea of why it was flagged.

It can be a little bit annoying to the user, at times, because they have to take another step to get some of their emails. But they understand the importance of the solution. There are a few hindrances now and then, but for the most part, it's very good.

It's a great first security gateway to try out, unless you know what you want, especially if cost is a factor.

We use it for spam filtering and anti-phishing on our email products.

When I started with my current company two years ago, it didn't have any type of spam filter. It was getting flooded and there were breached email accounts on a regular basis. Since I put in SpamTitan, I've had three breached accounts in Outlook, over the past two years, among our 160 employees. I've seen a drastic improvement in security.

It definitely saves employees' time because they don't have to sort through junk and spam emails. On any given day we have between 400 and 500 emails blocked by SpamTitan. My current weekly report shows that six viruses were blocked within that time span. It has really impacted me because every time an employee would get a spam email, they would post it to our team's forum and tag me. I'd have to look at it and it would waste my time. Now, our employees don't get spam emails.

I'm a real big fan of the new Link Lock feature.

I also use the solution's geo-blocking. The only downside about that is that our owners are from the UK, so I have to be careful about that. But the geo-blocking has resulted in about a 5 percent decrease in spam emails and that's big, given how many emails we have coming in. And geo-blocking is very easy and very intuitive to use. If I want to block country X, but allow these other countries, it is very easily managed.

Another nice feature is how tailored it is so that I can adjust the domain reputation score. At certain times of the year we run marketing campaigns and I can raise the score a little bit and that way we get feedback more readily. And during Christmas time, when the bad guys try to pull people in, I can turn it down and make it a little bit tighter. People will then let me know, "Hey, I need this email, I'm blocked," and I can do that within five to 10 minutes,

It would be nice if the reporting feature could be updated. 

Also, the feel of the web interface is a little dated. It has been the same ever since the days when I first started learning it. It's nice because it's familiar, but I could see how it might turn people off because it's not necessarily flashy.

I have been using TitanHQ SpamTitan off and on for the past five or six years and consistently for the last two years in my current company.

The stability is perfect. I've never had a problem in two years. It's one of the things that I have to worry least about maintaining. Being in a 300,000-square-foot warehouse with IDFs and not having to stress about that is very nice.

To scale it, I don't have to do anything. If we go over a certain number of emails per day, from back and forth, from a certain email address, it gets counted as a license. As long as I stay under our license number, I'm fine. But it can scale as much as I want. The scalability is fantastic.

It's deployed against eight domains within a range of in-house and warehouse staff. A lot of people are on mobile devices and we don't see any slowdown with it, and that's fantastic. 

We have multiple locations within Texas, and the nice part of it being on the cloud is that it's not something that we have to apply to each individual site. We can just apply it to the cloud in front of our 365 and all of our offices are covered. We don't have to build special roles and profiles for each location. It's just one for the company.

They're close to perfect. When the new Link Lock feature came out, they called me and said, "Hey, Robert, we know that you are interested in this. Let's show you what it is." We set it up and bought it and now it's deployed. 

They're proactive but not overbearing.

I have used a competitor of SpamTitan, and their support ranks at a nine out of 10 against that other company because, with that company, it was days before I would hear something from them. With SpamTitan, it's usually the same day.

Positive

We did not have a previous solution, but SpamTitan was my go-to. It was a requirement when I took the job.

It's a cloud solution and I enjoyed going through the rollout and deployment because the vendor was very helpful with that. They were there for any questions that I had, because things had changed since I had last implemented it. And we have multiple domains under our umbrella, and the ease of SpamTitan as a multiple-domain solution was really nice.

I would rate the deployment process an eight and a half out of 10. There were some things that probably could have been tuned up, and maybe explained a little bit better, but they were there to help me if I had any questions.

The implementation was pretty methodical. They would say, "Okay, Robert, this is what we need to do. This is how we need to set it up. We need to change these things." I would do those things that night, come in the next morning, and we would make sure the mail flow was working. They were very step-by-step-oriented, and that was nice.

The ease of configuration, after deployment, was moderate. You spend a week or two learning it and testing things out and you get pretty proficient with it pretty quickly.

And maintenance of it is 100 percent lightweight. I rarely touch anything.

We used TitanHQ's engineers directly. My experience with them was fantastic. They made it easier than I thought it would be with the time difference, because they're in Ireland. But they made it work. They're very professional.

On our side, it was just me involved.

We have seen ROI, not only in time but in security. On top of that, with the Link Lock feature, it really does prove itself.

The pricing is very reasonable and very comparable in the industry. It's not the cheapest, but it's not the most expensive.

Their licensing structure does leave a little bit to be desired. I would like it to be easier to understand how I can add licenses and update things.

I did a lot of evaluation, comparing cost and functionality for my partners on the board, but in the back of my mind, SpamTitan was the only one I wanted to use.

I have read a lot of tech releases and about certain products over the past 15 years. I keep an eye on certain things but SpamTitan has been voted one of the best spam blockers over the past many years. It's also very easy to use. I'm a one-man shop in a company with 160 people. That's a lot for one person, especially the director of IT, to be responsible for. 

It's simple enough to log in to the solution, that I can walk one of my owners, or the CEO or CFO, through that process if I'm out of the office. That is a big advantage. It's not overly complicated, although it could be refined a little bit more.

My advice would be to watch your domain reputation score. That can be a little bit odd and a little bit finicky at times. Other than that, pull the trigger and go for it. It is easy and safe.

I give the solution a 10 out of 10. I've never had a problem with it to this day. When my owners come to me and say, "Hey, can we cut costs?" I'll say, "We can." If they say, "What about SpamTitan?" my answer is "Nope." Then I show them the reports and they'll say, "Yep, we're not getting rid of it." It sells itself. It's very easy to prove its worth and that is very beneficial for me.

We are focused on the MRR and the MSP revenue is the main one. This shifts the relationships to long-term with our customers. Our aim is to raise the bar of the customer satisfaction and value we provide.
SpamTitan is a natural add-on for our portfolio of MSP and MSSP offerings. We love upsells, so all the customers will eventually be offered the other products from TitanHQ, but it will be step by step. Usually, it takes time to onboard a new customer. We distinguish technologies, processes and people onboarding. This is the reverse order by importance, but the right one in the timescales.
Spam protection is not a new thing on the market and most customers have some other solutions in place. When we replace another MSP, we inherit agreements that can't be cancelled today. We onboard customers with many different technologies, so we have to provide service for them and wait for the contract to expire before we can replace that technology.

We use SpamTitan to reduce to amount of time our clients' employees spend on spam emails and protect them from malicious links and attachments to improve overall IT security. These are the primary use cases. With inflation in salaries, we don't want to waste the time of our customers and employees. Also, even if we provide IT security awareness training, some people may still click or respond to something in the wrong way. The e-mail channel is still the prefered method for virus distribution.

Every employee faces an avalanche of emails daily, so one doesn't want to make the picture worse. It is preferable to remove as much as possible and still have that self-learning mechanism.

Most potential customers worldwide are aware of spam and malicious emails, so it's an easy sell. We don't have to convince them or provide a lot of use cases. It's enough to compare the competing solutions and what they can do. 
We use SpamTitan in-house, and we recommend it to our customers. We don't have to explain how it will impact user productivity. They know it's something essential. If they don't have an anti-spam solution, they must deal with a lot of spam, which is very time-consuming. A standard office user spends between 30 and 120 minutes daily sorting through emails.

It becomes more effective as time goes on. Users receive reports and provide suggestions about what to do. After a while, the system learns what is safe or malicious, becoming more precise with fewer false positives.

SpamTitan is perfectly suited for MSPs. It's easy to use and sell. It's also straightforward to configure and monitor. In my opinion, software developers at TitanHQ did an excellent job with SpamTitan. 

There are some minor technical aspects of the portals and management interface that could be improved, but there's nothing that prevents us from doing the job. 

Most of the cloud-based service providers allow us to dive deeply into all the customers from a single console. Currently, I can only see our company on the console and not any of the customers, i.e. a multitenancy approach is required for every partner portal tenant. A single pane of glass.

The geo-blocking features could have more customization options. For example, our technical operations are based in Bulgaria. Same for VMware Bulgaria, HPE Bulgaria, etc. If you geo-block India and Bulgaria, there is no way to communicate with the HP call centres.

SpamTitan will be busy with the tricky parts and not the basic ones. If you install and start using SpamTitan, where the IT maturity is low, you'll have a lot of false positives, and it will ask the user for suggestions. The customer might say, "Actually, this new product is not very good. It's asking me for everything." I would say, "Yes, it's because your organisation didn't do your job before that."

In other words, SpamTitan isn't the whole solution to the problem. SpamTitan needs someone to sort out the IT security audits and rectify the discovered issues or vulnerabilities to ensure all the prerequisites are there. After that, SpamTitan will do a proper job, but not every managed service provider or IT company understands that well. Again maturity is critical and it is applicable against MSPs, not only the customers.

I used SpamTitan in various roles for the last few years. We are a relatively new MSP in the UK, but the Bulgarian MSP has been in business for 21 years.

Email isn't real-time communication, so no one will notice if an outage isn't more than half an hour. I've never had any complaints from our users or customers. I would assume there were no outages at all. If there were any outages, they went unnoticed.

In 2018, I experienced an issue with a SpamTitan competitor, it was out for around an hour. An outage could have a potentially high impact. Just imagine if you stop the email service to your sales team. Most organizations will survive if they can't use email for an hour, but not all of them. Still, the negative impact will increase with the time of the outage.

SpamTitan is a cloud solution.  They've got a significant customer base worldwide and should have the experience of scaling out and scaling up already.

We have no concerns about scalability. Our existing customers are stable and don't expect a significant increase or decrease at the moment. There are always fluctuations, but we don't foresee significant changes. Our expectation is a gradual increase in the client base and more consumption of the SpamTitan service.

I rate TitanHQ support ten out of ten. We needed help only once, and the issue was resolved in a day.

Our team love the whole experience of partnering with TitanHQ. It's exceptionally smooth. Most of them are of the mindset that they want to respond as soon as possible. Everything is seamless. If any of us need an answer, we just shoot them an email and get what we need after a couple of hours. It's simple, and the billing is sorted out, so I don't have to think about it. Everything is automated, and I've got the correct reports. It's no hassle and a considerably valuable is presented to MSPs and end customers.

Positive

The only competing solution we used was Mimecast. The technology is fine and it works, but the pricing is prohibitive for some customers. Especially the archiving and the pearl in the crown is the data download from the archive.

Most customers use Mimecast to archive, but it's painful financially to move on from there. Other customers only use M2 due to the reasons above. They're much easier to migrate to SpamTitan. There are many other email archiving solutions, that provide a similar service.

There's no significant difference between SpamTitan and Mimecast from a technology perspective. They probably overlap 90 per cent. There are some minor differences that are insignificant. It wouldn't play a huge role in a customer's decision. However, Mimecast is significantly more expensive for the whole solution.  

SpamTitan is stable, and the support is doing its job as expected. We only opened one ticket the last year, and it was sorted during the day. It is a pragmatical decision to move to SpamTitan, considering all the factors.

Setting up SpamTitan is extremely easy. Some customers have the technical knowledge to set SpamTitan up, but in general, they preferer to use an external partner for the implementation. Everything is on the cloud. You only need to tweak a few DNS records and provide the proper training to the end-users.

The deployment is straightforward. Sometimes, we have to help the customer to sort out a mess internally before they can set up our solution. The deployment takes around an hour or two if you only need to update the DNS records. If you've got all the data from the customer and you only have to apply the changes, you need an hour or two. Afterwards, you have a period of initial support where you hold the customer's hand in case something is wrong. Generally, it's straightforward and quick. In the worst-case scenario, it takes 24 hours. The end IT user training may take longer.
One person is usually enough to handle the deployment, but we may require an additional person with experience with the customer's email servers. For instance, they might need specific knowledge of Office 365, Exchange Online, Gmail corporate edition, etc. If there is an issue with a client's email servers, we might assign another person to help if the first one is unfamiliar with the email server technology.

Business organisations aren't paying salaries for their IT users to fight spam. Even if each user only spends 15 minutes daily moving all the spam to the junk box, they can multiply that by each workday for the whole year. Any spam solution will cost just a fraction of the payroll wasted.

The time to value depends on the scale of the organization, but a client will probably see a return in the first year. SpamTitan needs to be trained to determine what is good and bad. How long? It depends on the organisation.

In other words, a single customer would need to compare the wasted employee time for the learning period. After that, they don't have any more wasted employee time or at least it is significantly reduced. SpamTitan is sorting out that issue for them for free. It's a huge gain of the work time back on their business.

The benefits start immediately after implementation. IT users can see all the daily reports of how much spam they receive. They've got the control to say, "Release that email," "Allow this email," or "Block this email." They start to teach the system. In the beginning, they're happy to do that, but eventually, they get bored. Fortunately, the system begins to do most of the work itself. After six months, the value is almost at 85 to 95 percent.

After a year, it is close to 100 percent of its value. If you want to use an anti-spam solution, you should expect a minimum of three years before you get a proper return on your investment. The first year is spent making the system aware of what's happening. You've got the real value in the second and the third year. It makes perfect sense when you spread the value across all the years.

The price of SpamTitan is reasonable and it makes sense. The end customer pays for the license and the professional services to us to set up the whole solution. Usually, it's part of a much bigger project.

I rate SpamTitan a ten out of ten. It's an easy sell. The price is insignificant compared to the money the customer saves. They also have an insurance policy with high protection against reputational risk. It mitigates so many other risks for the organization. A modern organization needs to have spam protection and the overall maturity of the UK market helps to shift the conversation from "Do we need such a solution?" to "What solution is best for us?"

SpamTitan MSP model has adapted well for MSPs to resell the subscription and get the money from the customer to pay it back to TitanHQ. The support is good and quick. SpamTitan does the job and ticks all the boxes from an end-customer point of view and a managed service provider perspective. They deliver real value to both parties.

We use SpamTitan as our email filtering solution.

We are in a college setting.

We have had excellent results with this product. Within a week of implementing SpamTitan, it blocked a ransomware event. This made our jobs a lot easier. Within the past six months, we've had 1.3 million emails come in, and out of those, 900,000 were clean. It's blocked 40 viruses.

It's blocked 115,000 emails from either invalid recipients or from different types of filters that it has, such as Real-Time Black List Filtering (RBL), or HELO reject.

In the beginning, we had issues with false positives while the system was using its AI to learn. We've only had one major incident, and that was due to the way our college wrote the email. It was worded so that students would reply, and SpamTitan thought that this was spam being sent. I had to fix that in the system. This problem wasn't SpamTitan's fault; rather, it was the way that we had set it up that caused it to act that way.

Overall, it has improved our security posture.

The most valuable feature is the reporting on bounced emails. If an email has been blocked or bounced, or a client tells me that they're not receiving a certain email, I can go into the reports and rather quickly look to see if it's shown up at all. If it has, I can either release it to the client or tell them what happened with it. Overall, the reporting is excellent.

The interface is very user-friendly and you can access it from anywhere in the world. It is easy to use, very well thought out and doesn't have a steep learning curve.

This product is excellent in terms of its overall intuitiveness.

The only downside is that there is a delay when we're waiting for a report to be generated. It normally takes between 30 seconds and a minute when you're dealing with more than a million emails.

I have been working with TitanHQ SpamTitan for approximately six months.

This is a very reliable tool. I look up logs every day, especially when clients say that they can't find an email. The system has not been down in the time that we've had it running.

The scalability is awesome. If we need more licenses then we call them and they take care of it.

The communication with them is perfect. In fact, we had a call with them earlier today that they initiated, which is awesome for customer service. We were doing biweekly checkups and now, we're moving to quarterly checkups.

The customer service is excellent. If there is a problem then a lot of the time, they know before we do. Compared to the technical support that I have experienced with other vendors, TitanHQ is top-notch.

I would rate the technical support a ten out of ten. They don't hesitate to help, which is unheard of in the IT industry.

Positive

This is the first spam solution that we used. The college knew that other colleges were being hacked, so I was brought in as a security person.

I started with the help desk and when I moved up to the security role, I saw that we didn't have a spam filtering solution in place. This is when we looked into implementing one.

We had the system set up and configured within 30 minutes. Being able to set it up quickly was important to us because we needed something as soon as possible. We wanted something that we could implement without too much setup on our side.

The vendor assisted us with the setup. We use Gmail, and they helped us with our Gmail configuration including setting up the folders. After that, the filter was working.

Just for myself and my team, using SpamTitan saves at least two hours per week.

We pay for licenses and the price structure is very clean. You don't have to pay for on-premises equipment and perhaps a monthly service fee for hardware.

When I began my search, I went to some security forums and looked at some online publications that I read frequently. I started with a list of perhaps 15 solutions, which got narrowed down to five and then got narrowed down to one.

One of the other products was Barracuda, and it was the price that set it apart.

Also, I like that with SpamTitan, there is no on-premises device that I have to maintain. I only have to pay for the license and don't have to pay for equipment with a monthly fee.

SpamTitan provides a feature that can be used for geo-blocking, although we don't use it because we're a college and we have international students.

My advice for anybody who is considering this solution is to definitely try it. Give them a chance because they gave us a free month to test it. When we first started looking, they acted like we were already one of their customers. They didn't just give us a link and tell us to figure it out. Rather, we set up a phone meeting, got everything set up, and we were running on their system for a month before we decided to adopt it. They gave us plenty of time to test their product before we purchased it. That was a big deciding factor in our decision to implement it.

In summary, this is an awesome system. They have other products and we're currently looking at them.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

It allows me to help my clients prevent bad stuff coming onto their network. It does security spam filtering, searching where it came from and whether it is spam or whatever. It also scans attachments, URLs, and addresses in the emails, then puts it in a quarantine. It is part of the tools in my suitcase of things which can help my client keep their network clean.

We are using it at Arcadia Ambulance. Other clients that I have use it as well. Further usage is definitely on the horizon, as needed. It really depends on who wants to use it. Pricing can be a decider.

It provides insurance for cybersecurity, which is required for a lot of clients. There is peace of mind, knowing that their network will be a bit more secure.

Sometimes, sources considered spam try to attack the client who has put in a filter. I don't know what they are trying to do, as they might be violating SPF records or attempting DMARC DNS violations. This solution prevents that spam from coming in. The client can then see that in their digest on a daily basis.

The digest and the quarantine are the most valuable features. I can go into the quarantine and see everything that was quarantined. On an individual basis, you can easily whitelist an email or address coming in, if needed.

The user interface experience is easy and intuitive. I don't think I have ever run into a situation where I don't know how to do something or don't know where something is at, then calling up someone at SpamTitan. The product is a little more powerful and user-friendly now at Arcadia Ambulance, then when I used it as Arcadia Ambulance. 

SpamTitan is easy to navigate. It is in a format that the end user can understand. I don't really need to handhold clients who are using it. They understand it is very intuitive. If an email comes in, and they don't want that to come in, then they can block the email as an email that they don't want to receive. It is fairly easy for them to navigate and manage the spam filter service.

I am not sure it does URL filtering or checks for phishing, but if it does, then great. That would probably be my room for improvement. I would like it to check for DCIN violations from locations where the email is being sent. Also, I would like it to do sandboxing, e.g., if an attachment is on an email, then it opens that at a different location to ensure that file attachment does not have any malicious aspects to it.

There is some room for improvement. Some of the biggest ones are better scanning of emails coming from what source and scanning emails for the content in the email. For example, determining if the email has malicious content in it by scanning the email and attachment. If it does that, then great, but that is very important to my clients and me. It is very important that you know what is in an email before it gets into an office's location. Not only where it is coming from, but what is in it, which is probably more important than where it is coming from. It could be coming from a client's partner or a business that they work with, but what if they get compromised? The perpetrators or bad guys start sending emails to Arcadia Ambulance, and they are infected with scripts and bad stuff. They think, "Okay, this is a legit user," since they get emails from them all the time, then they get hit. That is how a lot of really bad stuff happens.

The stability of SpamTitan is equivalent to other email security solutions that I have previously used. Some of them have more bells and whistles that you can add. For example, inside the email subject line, you can put in the words encrypt secret, or secure. Then, it will automatically secure that email and send an email to the person who is supposed to receive it. They can identify it for themselves in a series of different Q&A questions. That is sometimes a deciding factor for clients.

I have used it in the past, quite a bit, at another company where the solution was sold. I was reselling it indirectly through another distributor and TitanHQ was hosting it on their server. That was different because Arcadia Ambulance is using it directly through TitanHQ.

It just gets it done. It could probably be improved with more options being provided. For example, being able to hold emails that come in for up to 30 days, so if an email is lost or whatever, you can go and read it again. Seeing emails for each individual is a feature that could be provided for both incoming and outgoing, almost like a cached copy of every email coming in and out.

There are 10 to 15 users using this solution. This includes finance, management, payroll, billing, and the assistance department. The assistance department assists in routing patients to their ambulance, e.g., where they will be picked up. They also address any issues that might come up, such as how long it will take the driver to arrive. It looks at traffic patterns and helps the ambulance get there, if they need help.

TitanHQ technical support is knowledgeable, but sometimes not accessible because they are a UK company. Sometimes when I need help, they might not be available to help me. I would rate them as eight out of 10.

The expertise, attentiveness, and speed of response from TitanHQ’s customer support team is pretty good compared to competing solutions’ customer support teams. It is equivalent.

Positive

Arcadia Ambulance previously didn't have anything. Therefore, when it came time to update their cybersecurity insurance, we helped implement SpamTitan, which met all the requirements. Before, it would sometimes go into the junk folder inside of Outlook.

It wasn't too difficult to set up and configure SpamTitan. I had to change the DNS, then configure and enable it for all the end users who would be using it. That wasn't very difficult at all. I actually did it by myself, then I had a conference call with a tech support person who double checked my settings and that my configuration was done correctly. So, it was fairly easy. It took about one or two hours.

I did have to talk to my boss at Arcadia and answer a few questions. Believe it or not, my email address was blocked so he had to unblock it.

I can make a lot of money reselling it. 

Partner profitability is good with Titan HQ's partner program. This means that I recommend it to clients who trust me. My time and effort to educate them is compensated by TitanHQ, who provides the solution to me at a lower price than what the public gets it at, then I can make some money.

My business is more secure. In which case, I am up all the time. I have fewer vulnerabilities, which is important. That is my return on investment for getting SpamTitan's spam filter. If I don't have it, then I could have large bills for resolving and correcting the damage that was done.

I just say, "The pricing is X amount per month and per mailbox."

TitanHQ is all over the world, and not all solutions are global. TitanHQ sees what is happening globally, adding to their experience and knowledge.

SpamTitan has helped improve my spam catch rate and reduce my false positive rate amongst the services that I use. For example, I use a firewall and most clients scan files, attachments, and data coming in and out. I don't use just one solution, but many different ones, so there is overlap.

I tell someone looking into this solution that it has a series of different security functions or features, then I inform them of other options out there.

Don't always assume that it does what you think it does. Clarify and ask questions. Ask if it can do other things besides the things that it currently does.

I would rate the solution as seven and a half out of 10.

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

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

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

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

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

Within the reporting part, when you look at the history of the emails, it would help if it were more intuitive. If you don't know where it is, you have to go through many things to find it. Once you know, it's fine. It's only an issue at the beginning.

I would also like to see SpamTitan improve on its antivirus software. I believe they're using Bitdefender and ClamAV. A problem with them is that they sometimes miss Trojans and malicious sites. We have internal antivirus software as well, and when we receive emails we see that our local antivirus software has found Trojans in them. SpamTitan should find better solutions for the antivirus. What they have is not so bad but it's missing some things. Of course, no solution catches 100 percent of what's out there.

We have been using TitanHQ SpamTitan since 2018.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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