TitanHQ SpamTitan Reviews

We are using it as a gateway antivirus. It is for spam protection of our Exchange Server.

It offers gateway protection. It allows our Exchange Server to be hidden behind the network. It limits the exposure to our Exchange Server. 

It saves me an hour a day by not having to go through people's spam. It gives me a little bit of confidence knowing that we have the ability to very quickly block out attachments that we don't want, such as macro-enabled spreadsheets or even HTML files. It's a big vector. It's very easy to configure to block and graylist a lot of things that we see coming in as a vector for email attacks. So, it gives us much better security overall, as well as some time savings on the administration side.

Content filtering as well as Link Lock, which is URL parsing, are valuable, but anti-spam would be the biggest feature to help reduce overall spam for the company. It allows users to control what spam gets quarantined, etc. Before we had SpamTitan, it was me going through 300 emails a day to whitelist or release items from quarantine, and now people could do it themselves. It has literally saved me an hour a day just doing that.

The interface is a little dated aesthetically. I know that's a small thing, but it could use a little bit of a facelift. 

The only other thing is to have more flexibility for multi-domain environments, but I don't know if it is technically possible. Currently, the sending and receiving is limited to your one domain. If you need to split the sending of emails through using different certificates, you don't have the ability to do that. So, multi-domain flexibility would be nice. Outside of that, technically, I haven't found any problems with it.

I have been using this solution for almost a year.

I had some issues with the last update. It was a little concerning at the time because we could see the emails queuing up in the system, and we couldn't understand why they weren't being released to the end users in the backend. A quick call to support again fixed that. So, there was a hiccup, but the support was there to assist. We were back up and running within 10 to 15 minutes.

I can't really compare its stability to our previous solution considering the fact that we didn't have anything that we managed by ourselves. We don't have anything to compare it to because the Exchange Server handled all the spam before we had this. Exchange is just as stable as sitting on a three-legged stool. So, I would say that it's stable.

We haven't run into that in terms of disk space and other things to see what it would take to expand it beyond its usage. Currently, I see scalability as not being a problem. If I needed to add more resources to the virtual machine, I could in a heartbeat. Licensing is easy to add on. It's just a support call to pay for more licensing, which is also cost-effective. So, I see it as being a scalable product.

In terms of our plans to expand its usage, we are always growing as a company. We're always adding more demand onto it just through natural hiring and expansion. It's still meeting our day-to-day needs.

They're very responsive. They don't have a phone number to call. You have to email them in order to get that phone call. The lack of a ticketing type of help desk setup is the only thing that is a stumbling block, but otherwise, they are very responsive.

Positive

On the government side of things, they used to use URL parsing as well. I can't remember the name of it. It was a big one, but they dropped it because it was so expensive, and we couldn't afford to pick it up. This has link parsing as well, and it still comes with the appliance. 

Its deployment is private. We host it on our own. It's with our own environment. The way we have it deployed is that we have all of our locations across the province. We have VPNed into one central location where we host all of our servers, our Exchange, etc. The SpamTitan appliance sits on that central network, and from there, our email would come in again over the internet or through the government, and then it would go through the appliance to the Exchange Server. That's it in a nutshell. We have a hyper-conversion infrastructure with HP SimpliVity. So, it's sitting on a virtual machine running on VMware right now.

Its initial setup was straightforward. Their documentation was very thorough. I had it all set up as a virtual appliance before I made a call to them to help run through the rest of the setup. They had it up and running within 10 minutes.

There is a very small learning curve. Their support is good. They do call you within a reasonable time. There are a lot of settings in this appliance that can be confusing or inundating to people that aren't familiar with the terminologies or the technologies. So, it can be a little bit intimidating, but I found that for the basic setup, for what you need, it works really well. For any of the advanced tasks, it's only a matter of going to the website to find out how to configure it.

In terms of the ease of use being a factor when deciding to go with SpamTitan, if it's something complex, I would expect good support to be there to help me through it, and if it's something simple, then all the better. So, I don't usually worry about setup as long as support is efficient enough to deal with it. In this case, SpamTitan was, so I didn't find it at all hard to set up or configure or go through the settings. We were up and running in about 10 minutes, so I'd consider that pretty good. I'd rate it an eight out of ten in terms of ease of setup. 

In terms of updates, there are updates that become available probably three times a year. I've only seen it once since we deployed it. So, that maintenance is required to update, but otherwise, the system is pretty self-sufficient.

We have 100% seen an ROI. We see something come in through a single vector, and we're able to squash it before it does any major damage. On the administration side of things, it's amazing. I can move on things a lot faster with SpamTitan. When I see an attack come in, I can easily stop it in its tracks and prevent it from moving forward really quickly. It has absolutely been a godsend.

Its pricing is good. It's probably one of the most competitive anti-spam and anti-malware appliances out there for email. I was doing some looking around for pricing before I came to SpamTitan, and for the feature set, the price is very reasonable and competitive.

There is an additional cost to Link Lock for link parsing. That was a separate add-on. It's called SpamTitan Plus, and that's how they bundled it. We opted to have that protection as well.

We were trialing Darktrace just to see what it would do. It was decent but grossly expensive. It was tethered to another product that we didn't have a need for. So, we did a trial of that product, and we did have some other experience with the government solution, but this one, we manage ourselves. It does a very good job for the price that you're paying for it. It's very cost-effective.

There is a free evaluation option. Take it and try it out. It's easy to slip into your network and see how it works before you buy it. The support team is there to help you everywhere in between. Try before you buy. That's the best advice that I can give, and chances are you'll like it.

We are currently not using the geo-blocking feature because we are receiving our email through a smart host, where all the emails are filtered through the government to us. It only appears as one geo-location. Another reason why we decided to go with this kind of appliance or virtual appliance was that we're moving away from that platform, and we'll be wide open to the internet, and we didn't want our Exchange Server completely exposed. Within about two months, this system will be handling all External emails from across the world, and we will be geoblocking some countries known to be big malicious users.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. It does its job, and it allows me to pivot in ways that I didn't think I needed to before. If I cared more about the looks, I'd probably give it a seven, but in terms of functionality and how it works, I don't have a problem with it. It works really well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SpamTitan filters all incoming mail. We don't allow anything to come into our mail server without passing through SpamTitan. It filters out malware, spam, and any other email-based threat. It's a SaaS solution that's entirely on the cloud. Everything is redirected from our server to the SpamTitan servers.

They do the necessary filtering and pass all the safe emails through to our server. Our servers are configured to only accept IP connections from three or four IP addresses that are specific to SpamTitan, so nobody else can get into the mail server.

Our system consists of two physical servers and several virtual servers. One box is in the office, and there's a backup server at my home. The mail server just happens to be my home. We have about seven or eight end users, but each user can have multiple accounts.  

For example, we have an account for receiving special categories of mail that are placed in a designated folder. In other words, we create accounts that are associated with individual people. We have an online credit card processing company, so when they send emails, it goes to an email address called info@wegmanlevin.com. When it arrives here, it gets split off into a separate folder.

SpamTitan reduced the spam and malware that gets to our Outlook clients. The prior solution we used didn't do that great a job with malware. I don't know if the time spent sorting through spam has changed compared to the previous solution. 

However, sometimes malware would get wrongly classified as spam. Some emails that used to get through were flagged as spam, but it actually turned out to be malware. That should never have gotten through at all. It should have been blocked or stripped. In some cases, malware infected people's systems with the previous solution. 

I like the ability to go online and view mail that's been quarantined. SpamTitan lets you look at the mail and decide whether you want to release it or not.

SpamTitan doesn't quarantine when it blocks things based on the remote block list or greylisting. It just deletes the email. When I try to look at these blocked items, it tells me they're gone. RBL or greylisted items aren't saved, so you can check them. There may be a setting somewhere that I haven't seen. 

We get some false positives sometimes. Once we spot it, we can add the sender to the safe list. Then it's no longer a problem. It seems kind of random at times. For example, I got an email last night from the fraud department at Chase Bank informing me that my card had been compromised. It was flagged as spam, so I logged in and released it. It's a balancing act between a spam solution that's overly aggressive or too loose about letting spam in. I think SpamTitan falls on the aggressive side, but it's usually not enough to cause any problems.

I would also like more control over reporting. The reporting is limited to once daily. With the old product, we could get reports multiple times during the day with all the emails quarantined since the last report went out. We had one report at 8:00 a.m. to tell us about all the overnight traffic. We'd also get notifications at noon, and 5:00 p.m., just before people went home.

Over the course of the day, only a few hours would pass before we reviewed a quarantined email. SpamTitan sends its report in the middle of the night, so something can be trapped there for 24 hours. There's a workaround. If somebody tells you an email they were expecting hasn't come through, an admin can go into the portal and release it. That's a hassle. 

Also, there's an attack where a hacker generates emails with the correct domain name but hundreds of different user names. SpamTitan bills by the number of users, and they don't allow you to distinguish between real users and bots. I think I have a limit of around 30 or 35 users, so if somebody hit me with hundreds of phony names, I would get reports generated for each one of those fake accounts and be billed for it. It hasn't happened, but it could. I'm not crazy about that aspect of it. I think it would make a lot more sense if I could give TitanHQ a list of all valid email addresses and tell them to bounce any other email addresses.

We have been using SpamTitan for about a year and a half. 

We haven't had any issues with stability

We're a small law firm, so I haven't had a reason to scale up SpamTitan, but I assume I could if necessary. It's not likely to happen in my business. If we doubled in size, that would mean going from seven to 14 people. I'm sure that wouldn't present an issue for the software. However, if we had hundreds of employees, I would prefer an on-premise hardware solution.

I've never had a problem that required support, but I contacted TitanHQ support initially with questions about how to tweak some settings. I rate TitanHQ support nine out of ten. 

Positive

We used SurfControl, but the version was no longer supported on our server. We originally ran this on the Windows 2003 server, but the product wouldn't install when we upgraded. When we approached the vendor about newer products, we found that all their latest solutions were online and a lot more expensive than SpamTitan, so I started to shop around.

I set SpamTitan up by myself. It was straightforward once I conceptualized exactly what we were doing and the way we were deploying this in the middle of our mail delivery cycle. We have updated the configuration by adding more domains since the original implementation and it was easy.

If it blocks one piece of malware from getting into my system, it has probably paid for itself several times over.

The cost of SpamTitan is reasonable for what we get out of the solution. 

I don't recall the names of all the solutions we evaluated,  but looked at Barracuda and a couple of others. We felt that SpamTitan was the best fit, given the size of our operation, monthly costs, etc.

I rate SpamTitan eight out of ten. It's a great option if you're a smaller organization that wants to keep spam and malware off your system. A larger organization may wish to consider the on-premise solution TitanHQ offers because of the licensing issues and limitations on reporting. I recommend that if it's cost-effective for your organization.

We are a managed service provider, and many of our customers have email on-premises with Microsoft Exchange Servers or through cloud-based services like Microsoft 365. They weren't satisfied with built-in spam filtering, received too many spam emails, and suffered from phishing attacks etc. This highlighted the need for a robust anti-spam solution for us to roll out for our clients, and we decided to go with TitanHQ SpamTitan. We've had a good relationship since then, and they cloud host our instance of SpamTitan; it's otherwise managed by us internally.

I don't think that's sort of in the scope of this type of product. So no, I don't think it really applies.

I like that advanced features such as DKIM signing are integrated into SpamTitan. It works well, and setting up DKIM can be cumbersome for many email servers, particularly with Microsoft Exchange. DKIM signing verifies the sender's authenticity by applying a signature to outgoing emails, and it was straightforward to set up within the solution.

TitanHQ support is very helpful and responsive. When we wanted to make changes, needed assistance customizing the solution, or had any concerns, they are there for us, and that's a key feature.

When clients approach us looking for tech services, we put together a proposal to address their needs, and if those include email security and anti-spam, we pitch SpamTitan. The price is per user, and we set up the solution in front of the client's email service. The product filters all incoming and potentially outgoing emails, allowing only the clean ones through. 

We appreciate how customizable and flexible the solution is. It allows us to operate how we want, especially as we have our own instance. We have two of them in a cluster for redundancy, and we can go in and make whatever changes we require with no problems. 

We have a good partner relationship with our TitanHQ sales rep. They are very responsive in terms of support; our concerns are taken seriously and resolved appropriately. We are an SMB and work primarily with other SMBs, so vendor relationships and trust are essential to us. When partnered with a gigantic company, there is a risk of our voice going unheard when we have complaints, which hasn't happened with TitanHQ. 

Regarding filtering emails, we have two main requirements: reducing the spam cluttering users' inboxes and, more importantly, filtering out malicious emails containing viruses, malware, phishing attacks, etc. The product has done a great job filtering those out, and when it comes to security, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. The consequences of a malicious email getting through are potentially very severe, and the system could be compromised. 

It can be hard to quantify as users aren't even aware of the viruses, malware, and phishing emails SpamTitan rejects before reaching their mailboxes. I'm sure it's saving employees' time, as just one malicious email can cost a significant amount of productivity. If someone's account is compromised, even if there are no other adverse effects, we still need to reset their credentials and multi-factor authentication. The more significant concern of an account being compromised is data leakage; if a bad actor got in and saw our emails, what sort of information can they glean from that, and how can they use it? We saw cases before we started to use SpamTitan, or in our clients who don't use the product, where malicious actors got in and were able to run financial scams because they could get into the emails and see invoices being sent to customers. Preventing these situations is one of the key selling points of the solution, and it has increased our spam catch rate and reduced the number of false positives. 

The authentication functionality could be improved. We liked having a single sign-on approach in that our customers could use the same username and password for their workstation, email, and spam filter. That integrates very well in an on-premise environment. Microsoft has since moved away from some of its legacy authentication methods, so it's no longer possible for our clients to use the exact login details for SpamTitan and Microsoft 365. SpamTitan has yet to introduce modern authentication methods. Although we can use the solution's native multi-factor authentication, it isn't compatible with Microsoft 365's MFA, requiring the use of different usernames and passwords. It would be great if TitanHQ could improve that to be compatible with modern authentication. 

There is room for improvement in automation; better wizards for deployment, for example.

We have been using the solution since April 2019, and we've filtered over 20 million emails for our customers.

We've had one major outage since 2019, where one of our nodes was taken down, and the other was impacted, but not entirely down. We needed support to get up and running, but the solution is 100% stable apart from that occasion. It's not perfect, but no cloud service is, and I would say that one issue over three years of use makes SpamTitan a highly reliable product.

I'd say the stability is comparable with other solutions. When we were with Roaring Penguin, there were one or two outages over a similar period. No product is up 100% of the time. When cloud services go down, we feel it because there isn't anything we can do, but SpamTitan has very high uptime, and I think most cloud services have very high uptimes.

We haven't had any scalability issues; our two nodes have handled all the traffic we're throwing at it, so we haven't had to scale beyond our initial deployment. TitanHQ manages that for us, and we don't have to pay any mind to scale resources in terms of CPU and RAM. At one point, they may have increased logging disk space. Other than that, there has been no need to scale.

I rate them a 10 out of 10. The support isn't 24/7, so tickets submitted on the weekend may not be answered until Monday, and there is a time difference as they are based in Ireland. We brought this up with our rep, and they gave us a direct line to get support from a technician in urgent scenarios. We used that once and woke the technician up on the other end. TitanHQ always adequately addressed our concerns; they took the step to make up for the issues we raised about the availability of technical support, which is very valuable. 

Positive

We have a large customer base, so we inherit the different solutions that come with them; that's a lot of different products. We had clients using Microsoft 365's built-in spam filter, GFI MailEssentials, and other on-premise solutions, so we became familiar with these products. As an MSP, we don't necessarily dictate our customers' solutions. We provided firewalls with email filters from a vendor called eSoft, then acquired by Untangle, and an anti-spam solution by Roaring Penguin Software. They were purchased by N-able, which shut down the service and pushed for our clients to move to Mail Assure. We were satisfied with Roaring Penguin and didn't like Mail Assure, which triggered our search for a new solution to offer our customers. There was also an internal goal to standardize in our company, to focus on one solution.

We chose SpamTitan because it was closer to what we were used to with Roaring Penguin; it was cleaner and more straightforward than the other products. Mail Assure, for example, had a confusing interface, so we went with SpamTitan as our first cloud-hosted solution.

We went with the cloud-hosted solution, so we didn't have to install anything, TitanHQ deployed it for us in the sense that they configured the environment.

In terms of deployment between my company and our customers, it's straightforward. There are just a few steps to add a new customer: adding their domain, adding the point where the mail is going, configuring the settings according to their requirements, and documenting the process. It only took us a few deployments to become very proficient at it. However, some automation, especially in the form of a deployment wizard to assist in setup, would be a welcome improvement.

There is always a tradeoff between feature-rich products and ease of configuration or complexity of setup. I would say SpamTitan is a happy medium, there are a lot of settings and a corresponding learning curve, but the documentation and support are there to make that process smooth. The UI is also user-friendly and straightforward, with little help buttons and question marks to click for more details. Configuration isn't any more difficult than I would expect with a feature-rich, complex product. Especially a spam filtering solution as it's such a cat and mouse game, it's never going to be one-size-fits-all. Our customers have widely differing requirements, so customization is vital. 

The maintenance is very light. The only maintenance requirements are occasional configuration backups and upgrades and version upgrades. Those consist of clicking install, next, and done, so maintenance is simple.

Any security solution is generally a good return on investment, whether it's spam filtering, antivirus, firewalls etc. We can't be sure what we have been protected from and what may have happened if we didn't have the protection SpamTitan provides.

The pricing and licensing are acceptable. The licensing is somewhat different; TitanHQ gives us a peak cap of simultaneous users, which they calculate as the number of email addresses viewed through so many days or weeks. That's considered our number of users, but it isn't always a one-to-one relationship, making it harder to resell. We can't say precisely that the solution costs X per month per user, but that's how we present the price to potential customers, and we just ensure we receive more than we pay to TitanHQ. The licensing hasn't caused us any problems, but it would be better if the pricing were per-user. I know that's not easy to achieve on a technical level.

We looked at the N-able Mail Assure solution and a Barracuda spam filtering product. We did the sales calls, received demos, and got quotes for pricing, but the SpamTitan UI won it for us.

I would rate this solution a 10 out of 10. 

We implemented the geo-blocking feature due to concerns coming out of Ukraine and Russia, so we decided to geo-block emails from that part of the world. Unfortunately, this isn't the product's fault; it didn't work for our customers because they had legitimate vendors or partners in that region. We had to turn the feature off because it interrupted our customers' business. That is not to say geo-blocking isn't a good feature; it just hasn't been compatible with our customers' needs. I can see how this feature could be handy in the future. 

I would advise reading the documentation and reaching out to support if you need any help. They're very helpful.

We use it for spam. Our biggest concern has been malware. Spam is a nuisance, but malware could be very damaging to our systems, and losing data just wasn't an option for us. It is that security side. The actual spam piece is probably secondary in my mind. Spam was certainly an inconvenience because of user complaints, but filtering out malware was huge for us. I would rather stop these things at the perimeter than rely on a local computer's antivirus.

We use it for exactly what it is supposed to be for. We use it for filtering out any malware that has been sent via email. For your truly obvious spam, I would rather put that out on the edges so end users don't have to see that junk in their junk mailbox. For some reason, being a college, the amount of spam we get is unbelievable. I would rather not overload users with too many things in their junk folders from Outlook. It just cuts down on the amount of noise that end users have to deal with.

We are a college. We are primarily a Windows shop, though we do have some Macs internally. Our servers are Windows-based. We have two locations. However, that whole idea of locations has gotten pretty fuzzy, not only with the cloud, but with the emphasis on remote work. The nice thing is that it filters mail before it even comes into our mail server and it doesn't matter where somebody is. They could be on campus at either one of our locations, or they could be at home, and SpamTitan will do what it is supposed to do.

It achieves a design goal that we have for in-depth defense.

We have had no cases of malware slipping through since we have had SpamTitan.

At times, I have used the geo-blocking feature. There are some hostile countries for whom I try to filter out traffic, be it through email or the perimeter firewall. We have to be careful with it, but it is good for cutting down on the amount of noise that we have to sort through.

The geo-blocking feature has worked well. Certainly some of that stuff can be spoofed, so it is not going to be 100%.For that really spammy spam, a lot of times the spammers don't even try to hide where they are originating from. For that, it has been good. There are a handful of countries that we just consider hostile, so being able to block those has been a good thing.

The geo-blocking feature seems to work fine for allowing exemptions based on a trusted sender's IP, domain, or email address. We haven't had any issues with it.

Over time, you set up additional filters, change the sensitivity level, and set up exceptions. The exceptions are powerful, so we don't accidentally filter out emails from a party that we work with. That has been great. 

It could be improved a little bit on the speed side. When I am trying to troubleshoot a mail message that somebody is looking for in SpamTitan, sometimes setting up the filters for the quarantine is a little bit pokey.

I have been using it for 10 years.

I haven't had to do upgrades. Anything that happens is done by the SpamTitan team, and it just stays up and running.

There have been no concerns in regards to stability. It just works. We haven't experienced any downtime with it. There have been no problems.

We are a small institution, so it certainly meets our needs. For us, it has been fantastic.

The technical support has been great. I haven't needed a lot of technical support, but the few times that I have reached out to them, they have answered quickly. I would rate them as 10 out of 10. 

The biggest thing for me to compare it to would be Microsoft. I much prefer dealing with SpamTitan because they are smaller. They are more responsive than some of the larger companies that we have worked with.

Positive

We tried some local things that were local to the computer itself, and typically a part of the anti-malware software. We found the performance hits were unacceptable and the filtering wasn't that good. It didn't satisfy that desire to filter those things out before getting to the user's computer. So, we did use other products, but they just weren't a good option for us.

SpamTitan has been much better than the Exchange Server competing product that we previously used, which would interfere with our backups of the Exchange Server. So, that had to go immediately. We were then depending on endpoint protection, which was just a terrible hit to us from a performance standpoint. Whereas, architecturally, SpamTitan does exactly what we want it to do. It is on the edge of our network, doing its job before anything even comes to our mail server.

SpamTitan was our very first spam filter. We were using an in-house Exchange Server, which didn't have viable filtering. We saw an ad for SpamTitan and brought it in, and it solved our problem. Later on, we did migrate away from an in-house mail service to Microsoft 365. While Microsoft's spam filtering is very good, I am not a big fan of trusting a single technology for something like security. I prefer the defense in-depth approach. 

Now, SpamTitan is more of a perimeter filtering system. What we primarily hope to get from it, and have been getting from it, is filtering out malware sent via email from the most egregious spam. We then let Microsoft be an additional layer after SpamTitan.

SpamTitan has absolutely helped save employees’ time by not having to sort through junk and spam emails. We first brought it in when we had the in-house mail solution and certain users were getting 300 to 400 spam emails a day. That was just a huge burden. Almost instantly, SpamTitan cut that down by well over 90%, even with the out-of-the-box tuning. That was a huge savings.

Even after we migrated to a cloud-hosted mail solution through Microsoft, it gives us that design goal of not trusting just one vendor's product for security.

The initial deployment was very easy. Basically, we just changed our MX records, and a minute or two later, it was working. It was very easy to deploy. 

It was very important to us that the setup and configuration were easy. Being a small school, we don't have a big staff for things like this. At the time that we brought it in, there was just one other person (a technician) and me. 

When there is a full range of IT services that we need to offer, I can't have a product that ties us up too much. So, SpamTitan has been easy to work with.

The SpamTitan team just walked us through it. There wasn't much to it because it was easy to work with.

Our ROI is excellent. Technically, we don't have to have it. Microsoft does an excellent job, but SpamTitan is so inexpensive that it is worth having that extra layer of defense. We just get a lot of peace of mind from having it.

We have considered dropping SpamTitan just to save little money on the budget. However, we thought through the cost of having a breach coming through email. There are certainly other attack avenues, but as far as email goes, SpamTitan is a bargain. It is using a different build entity than Microsoft uses, and I like having less of a monoculture when it comes to security.

The pricing and licensing have been very fair. I can't complain.

Because we are a small school, the cost is an issue for us. SpamTitan was much more affordable than some of the other solutions.

Overall, it is a great product. It is simple. It just does what it is supposed to do. We just haven't had issues with it.

Every now and then, I check and see if we have a false positive or add some geo-filtering. I will use the edge filtering at times, but I wouldn't call that maintenance. I will add exceptions if we bring on a new partner, then I will make sure that their stuff is whitelisted.

I would rate SpamTitan as 9.5 out of 10. I am just going to take off half a point for the performance issues at times. Not all the time, but sometimes when I am setting up filters to try to sort through the spam in the quarantine. Sometimes that gets a little bit pokey, but honestly, it has better performance than what I get out of Microsoft.

If you are looking for something where this solution is the first thing that scans your mail before it even goes through your mail server, then it is an outstanding option. I would highly recommend it with no reservations.

We really do love SpamTitan. It just works. It is simple, and I don't have to think about it. 

We use it for filtering spam.

We saw the benefits the same day that we deployed it. Normally, our client would get between 300 and 600 spam emails each day, and we reduced that to 15 on the first day. That was a real win and they were very glad we implemented it.

Employees used to take about two hours a day to sift through all the spam emails that were coming in, to see if they were valid or not. Now, it is just an afterthought. They spend two to three minutes because so few spam emails come through. They just need to take a quick glance and say, "Well, okay, I need to have that one and the rest are spam emails."

What I like the most is the filtering and the granularity with which you can really zoom in on the spam that's coming in and configure it exactly so that what you don't want is blocked.

What I also love about SpamTitan is that you can deploy it on your own hardware, so if there are any performance issues you can just upgrade the hardware and you'll be fine.

I'd like to see something like "My First SpamTitan," by which I mean, "Guide me through the things I need to set, and tell me about the things that you're setting already." That way I would get a good feeling for setting up the product, rather than having to figure it out by myself, which is what I did. It wasn't a big issue because I've configured spam filters before, but I think someone else might be overwhelmed with all the options you can set.

They can either keep it as it is, which is rather technical in looks and in management, or they can have more of a "My First SpamTitan" interface, which would guide you through things and give you a good configuration at the start. Later, you could perfect it by tuning it yourself. Something like that would be nice.

I have been using TitanHQ SpamTitan since 2016 or 2017.

It's very stable. We have never had it go down unless it was our own fault. Overall, the stability is very good when compared with other solutions.

From what we have seen, it is a scalable solution. We started with about 20 licenses and ended up overusing them by 70 licenses when we got up to 90 email addresses. We later had to reduce that because it was over our licensing limit, but there was no problem in scaling at all.

Our client is a company with just one location and a fiber internet line. They have about 70 people using the internet.

The technical support is very good. One time, because of something we did, and not because the product failed, they were quick in resolving it. We made a support call and they said, "Okay, can we look at the machine?" We had to enable remote support and they could directly log in. After they logged in, they were able to quickly resolve it. It took about two hours after we placed the call, at the most, for them to get back to us and resolve the issue.

Compared to other solutions I've used, TitanHQ's support is very speedy. 

They are perfect.

Positive

We previously used Cisco IronPort. We switched because Cisco IronPort wasn't supported anymore and we would have had to buy a very expensive next-gen tool from Cisco. We didn't like that, so we looked for another solution.

We had a lot of spam coming in at a time when we were using a local Exchange Server and there was not really much we could do in a granular way. We were looking for a new solution that would filter the email more perfectly. We found that in SpamTitan.

I did the deployment. For an engineer, it's a fairly straightforward process. Once you install it, you get the proper tips for configuring it. It took me about half an to get us up and running and configuring took a bit longer. That was the fine-tuning. But setting it up, getting it to work, and placing it in between the internet and our email took just half an hour. It was very easy. You do need knowledge of networking and email routing, but that's it.

I was the only one involved in the deployment, and it requires just one person for maintenance. We keep to a monthly cycle of looking at the updates and we update if there are any, but it takes almost no effort to maintain it.

It has saved us a lot of management work. It's almost a fire-and-forget solution. There is some spam coming through, but that's just because the spam creators are also getting smarter. We have to tweak it a little or maybe update the system and, after that, it comes up roses.

Our most important return on investment is time because the solution has saved us a lot of time by not having to worry about emails coming in. The things that are coming in now, most of the time, are just right. Sifting through emails went from two hours to a few minutes.

The pricing is just right. There are no additional costs to the standard fee, as far as I know.

We looked at some open-source solutions but didn't find anything to our liking. When we came up with SpamTitan it was a bullseye. It was exactly what we needed. It's a complete package. 

With the open-source packages, you still have to do a lot yourself, whereas SpamTitan has a development organization behind it. Anything that needs to be in there is there. The setup is simple and I was configuring away after about half an hour. That was a big difference compared to the open-source solutions at the time.

We based our choice on the things TitanHQ said it could do. We installed it and it did everything they said it would do. It has saved a lot of effort and a lot of time.

Just do it. Make it a real-world example because once you have it set up and running, it runs just fine. It's a very good solution.

It's an eight out of 10 because the interface could be improved.

We use it for spam filtering.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Almost all of our email spam filtration goes through SpamTitan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We tried three other options before we settled on SpamTitan.

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

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

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

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