SpamTitan is our primary defense for email against spam and viruses.
We have it running on a virtual machine image that they gave us. It is hosted in our data center.
SpamTitan is our primary defense for email against spam and viruses.
We have it running on a virtual machine image that they gave us. It is hosted in our data center.
We have noticed a trend of approximately 5% growth in spam per year, versus legitimate email, and SpamTitan seems to catch almost all of it.
Using SpamTitan saves us a ton of time. We have users that get literally thousands of junk emails a day. The longer you are at an organization, the more spam you seem to accumulate, and it seems mostly the owner specifically. In our scenario, they went from getting like two or three thousand junk emails a day, to now just two reports a day. They don't have to go through each email to filter what's actual work and what's just junk.
We had some users that were spending two or three hours going through email. There is a huge difference for some people, although it depends on the user. Some people do not use email often so it's not really beneficial for them. For the people that spend a lot of time sending and receiving email, it's saved quite a bit of time. It is upwards of hours in a day. Also, it saves me a ton of time because it prevents them from clicking the wrong thing.
Twice a day, it sends a report of what it has caught. I haven't actually looked at the report in perhaps two years because the accuracy for my inbox was always dead on. At the same time, however, we have a lot of users that check the report all the time. One reason is that they may have a new client that is accidentally classified as spam, or they receive a legitimate email that contains a lot of spam keywords. One of our clients is a large equipment manufacturer and they send legitimate emails with marketing taglines that sometimes get flagged as spam. For the most part, we have very few false positives.
SpamTitan is good at catching zero-day viruses and spam messages.
One feature that helped us a lot in the past year is the Link Lock. It will check the URLs that are included in messages and if they're not trusted sites then the link will be blocked. For example, our users will receive an email that says something to the effect of "Your password is about to expire, so please click on the enclosed link." If they click on the link, it causes a huge headache for us. Now, it's automatically blocked, which saves us a ton of time.
The Link Lock feature will check every URL in your email against a database of legitimate URLs. A malicious URL might go to a phishing site or a hacker site but if it isn't in the list of valid URLs, it will respond with a message that says "Blocked by SpamTitan Link Lock". It re-writes the URL so that it goes through their server, rather than the URL itself.
We just recently turned on the geo-blocking feature to block emails from Russia and Ukraine. We don't monitor the email that is blocked, unless it comes under the "relay denied" classification. That is approximately 2% of our total intake.
We use the whitelist feature to allow exemptions based on trusted senders. This is an important feature because we have approximately 12 sub-companies, and there is a good deal of marketing material sent between people. We configure them as trusted senders so that the messages don't get classified as spam, due to a large amount of marketing material. The whitelist allows them to communicate with each other and not get filtered out.
The user interface is great. Everything is in the browser; it is easy to set up and there are not a lot of tabs.
Most of it is simple to use and the side that the user sees is pretty intuitive. That said, there are grades of difficulty based on user experience.
When an email is quarantined, there are a couple of different search filters to help find what you're looking for. Having more choices would be helpful because as it is now, we can search for inbound or outbound, the score, the subject, and the email address. I would like to see a filter for searching inside the message content when it is quarantined.
I have been using TitanHQ SpamTitan for approximately seven years.
This is a stable product. Our current uptime is 412 days. It was offline at the time because we had an outage in our data center. We had something plugged in wrong, so the fault was on our side.
Our service from them has been steady, including our daily antivirus updates. We've not had any problems. Stability is very important to us because if this goes down then we don't get any email.
We are not really seeing a heavy load on the machine that we host it on, so I assume it could go much higher. Now, we have a 500-user license, but we seem to be going over it every day. For example, at the moment, it's showing 755, so we're probably going to increase to a 1,000-user license when it comes up for renewal in another month.
With a current load of approximately 6%, I'm sure that it can easily go to 10,000 users on our hardware.
Everyone in the company uses it, although I and the CTO are the only two administrators. Our CTO takes care of the management, whereas I am the network/security administrator. I normally perform the maintenance, although the CTO does it sometimes.
If I need support, I can immediately send a ticket and click connect on the website. They'll be able to go in and do whatever they need to fix an issue.
Initially, we were hesitant to join because they are based out of Ireland and we were concerned about being able to get support. However, it's never been an issue. I'm the main contact for support, and I might call them once a year for a weird issue. Usually, they get back to me within 30 minutes.
I would definitely rate their support a ten out of ten.
Positive
Before SpamTitan, we used to use MailGate, from Tumbleweed. The biggest difference between these two products was the price. The functionality was very close to the same but SpamTitan is approximately 30% of the price. Similarly, both are pretty stable and I wouldn't say that one was more stable than the other.
We switched because everything seemed to be as good as it was with solutions from the other big providers, with a huge difference in cost.
It took us approximately an hour to set it up, and most of that time was on Office 365 to route incoming mail through SpamTitan first.
Ease of setup is something that was more important to me than it was to management. They would have preferred to use a free, open-source product. The problem with the open-source products is that anytime we needed to make a configuration change, it would take three or four days of research to figure out how to do it.
This is in contrast to SpamTitan, where there are only eight or nine tabs, with eight or nine subtabs on each one. For the most part, setting it requires visiting perhaps six tabs. If you have a question about any of the features, there is a question mark icon on the browser explaining each one. It's pretty well organized from the administration side.
We implemented it ourselves.
We have realized ROI from our time savings. It has saved me hundreds of hours because we have people in one department that would constantly click on links that were bad. Most people would know not to click on them but certain people would always click on malicious links. Once that happened, they had a virus and it was sending out viruses to everyone in their email contacts.
Every time that happened, it cost me between 50 and 60 hours of time to fix the problem. It was an absolute nightmare that used to happen once or twice per month, and now the incidence of that has gone down to almost nothing.
We implemented SpamTitan over other solutions because of its price. The functionality of all of these services is pretty much even, with the main differences between them being support options and where you can deploy them.
For other vendors, we had to purchase their hardware or employ a cloud solution that adds thousands of dollars per year to the cost. SpamTitan is something that you can put on your own hardware and it runs great.
The only additional cost was for Link. It isn't expensive, at perhaps a dollar extra per user.
Management was interested in saving costs by using an open-source solution. However, they are more difficult and time-consuming to configure.
We also looked at Barracuda and we didn't find much difference between the two, except for cost. We chose SpamTitan because it is more cost-effective.
We have not had any issues with the product, the pricing is probably better than most vendors, and the support is definitely top-notch.
My advice for others is that if you're looking for a simple solution that you can deploy quickly, especially if you're on a budget, then I definitely recommend SpamTitan. You can have a full solution within a day.
I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.
Our primary use case is filtering incoming emails.
SpamTitan is a product that saves us time. The less spam that you have, the more time you have because you're not digging through the mail that hits your inbox. The other thing is that it blocks potential trojans, viruses, and phishing attempts. This means that IT has less to deal with in case something does get through and opened, resulting in an infection.
On the front end, the user community doesn't have nearly as much email to deal with, in particular, spam messages. On the back end for IT, it's a huge time saver because we're not infecting our network with malware.
Before we got SpamTitan, the amount of time spent dealing with unwanted emails depended on the user. People that were dealing with a lot of outside entities would receive more spam because their email address is out there. Depending on the user, they might have three or four spam messages, or somebody might have between 20 and 30 to deal with.
For people on the higher end, with 20 or 30 spam messages that are hitting their inbox, it's time-consuming to go through and determine whether something is valid or invalid. In some cases, an email says it's coming from within the company, perhaps somebody in our purchasing department. When another employee sees the name, they assume it's safe but in reality, it's a spoofed email address. People often don't feel like digging into it so they just look at the email, resulting in the introduction of a trojan, virus, or other malware.
The amount of time that it takes to deal with spam messages varies. It depends on the type of spam that is hitting the inbox. In the morning when you fire up your email program, a high-end user may spend 15 to 20 minutes going through stuff just to make sure it's valid or not valid.
Then, throughout the day, these people were getting spam messages. It eats your time, even with one or two here and there, because you're taking time to maybe open the message, then investigate if it's really coming from a valid address or not. Even if it only takes a minute to do one message, and you get 15 of those a day, that's 15 minutes of your time. That's quite valuable.
We have thousands of users so even if 2,000 of them get five spam messages a day, and it takes each one a minute to deal with, it's a lot of time.
Using SpamTitan has immensely improved our spam catch rate and reduced our false positive rate. In a five-year timeframe, it has blocked between 60 million and 70 million messages.
The most valuable feature is the protection that it offers against spam, phishing, viruses, and other such attacks. That's the biggest benefit of the product.
We use the geo-blocking feature, which helps to reduce our spam intake. There are known locations that are notorious for sending spam, viruses, and so forth, which is one of the reasons we use it. Right now, our filter is blocking approximately 75% of the mail that hits our door. Only 26% of the mail we get actually passes.
We use the geo-blocking feature for restricting emails based on country, and it works well. However, if something does pass that is spam or a phishing attempt, then we may block by IP address if necessary. This is very important to our organization because spam email is bad, and it's a problem for us.
We are able to create exceptions based on a trusted sender's specific location or IP address, and it works fine for that. We don't have a large rule base and in most cases, the senders, who are typically customers or vendors that we deal with, do not have their email exchange set up properly. They don't have the proper checks in place, so we add exceptions for them.
The user interface is good, and it's pretty easy to use once you learn your way around. That said, there's a lot to it and it's in-depth. There are many aspects to the interface, and there are a lot of tabs.
Overall, in terms of the system's intuitiveness, it's okay. When you click on a tab for system settings, as an example, there are multiple tabs that you can drill down into from there. Sometimes, it can be a little bit difficult to find out where you want to go, just because there are many layers to the interface.
It is difficult to say how I might improve it. There are many pieces to it, and a lot of layers, but the way they have it set up is fine. Sometimes, however, you have to search around a little bit to find out where you want to go.
There are eight main tabs and once you click on one of those tabs, it takes you into another area where there can be up to eight or ten other things that you can click into. Then, when you get in there, it might be another six or eight areas that you can look at.
If you go into system setup, as an example, and then go to static routing for network configuration, that's three layers deep. You would probably figure that the network configuration is going to be in the system setup, so you would start there intuitively, but it's a lot of options.
One of the areas that can be improved is the GUI. The product works well but finding things in the interface can sometimes be a bit difficult, just because it's so in-depth and covers a lot.
We have been using TitanHQ SpamTitan for approximately five years.
This is a very stable product. We have not had any downtime and we have not had the product crash on us, where it was not filtering mail.
We have not rebooted our server for five years.
SpamTitan is easily scalable. If you give them more money, they'll give you more licenses.
We are a large company with many factories in Mexico, China, Vietnam, and several US cities. We have several thousand employees and in the past five years of using SpamTitan, we have blocked between 60 million and 70 million messages.
We have 100% adoption. Any email coming into our company has to go through this filter before it hits our Exchange server and then is distributed to the user community.
The technical support is really good. I've had great luck with the support group out of Titan HQ. They are quick to respond and typically have a solution very quickly. If they don't, they'll dig into it and keep updating you as to where they're at in the process of finding a solution. Overall, I'm pleased with the support.
I would rate their support a nine out of ten. It's not a perfect rating because there is always that time when you don't get the exact answer you want, or they can't do exactly what you want. In any case, that could be a software update or something that has to be reprogrammed. They will send that up to development, but sometimes it takes time for that to happen.
If comparing support to other vendors, their response time is very quick. When you open a ticket, you get a response right away that they acknowledge that you've submitted a help desk ticket with them. Then typically you'll get a response from the tech at Titan HQ that has picked up the ticket.
They'll let you know either right then about a solution, or that they're investigating. Typically you will hear back, I would say normally within the hour, with a solution, or potential questions to help with a solution.
I would rate them above average as far as their response time and working through issues.
Positive
Prior to using SpamTitan, we were using the filtering that is part of our Microsoft Exchange.
It's quite easy to set up. There are a lot of defaults that are set up in how it functions and what it does. Then, as you start using the product more, you can get more in-depth and put more controls and filters in place. As far as initially setting it up, the process is pretty easy.
Having it easy to set up is always an important thing. The less time you have to spend configuring and setting up a product, the more time you have for doing other things.
From start to finish, we spent approximately one day getting it set up. The server was installed, the software was installed, and then we set up getting our mail routed through it.
After the initial setup, there is some programming and other things that you do over time. But, I wouldn't consider that as part of the installation process.
We did the implementation ourselves, with the help of Titan HQ. Our experience with them has been good. The products that they sell are typically good and easy to use, so you'll potentially put them into other locations or buy more licenses.
The deployment can be done with one person, and we have a couple of people on staff that take care of it. If there are issues with false positives or things of that nature, we've got a couple of people on staff that oversee it. That's not their only job; they're network administrators or systems admins and they have multiple tasks. That said, they have a couple of people that are familiar with the product and work on it.
Pricing is on par with other products, and it's reasonable. They have different categories as far as the size of your company and how they license it, which is good.
We evaluated three or four products at the time, although it was several years ago and I don't recall exactly which ones.
We preferred SpamTitan after looking at other customer reviews, talking with some references, and they just came out the winner as far as capabilities. Support is a big thing for anybody when it comes to dealing with a product, and it's important because you're potentially blocking viruses and other malware that could harm the company very badly.
My advice for anybody who is looking into implementing this product is to first go through their demo with them and make sure you understand how in-depth the product is because there's a lot to it. If the end-user wants a product that they plug in and turn on and they never have to look at it again, SpamTitan is not it.
This is an in-depth product and there are multiple ways to block things, although it is fairly plug-and-play with their default configuration. Other than just the actual configuration of IP addresses and things of that nature, there's a lot to it.
I know there are simpler options out there, but they also are not as comprehensive as what you can do with the product.
Overall, as far as the product goes and how it catches things, I'm quite happy with it. Ninety percent of the time, it does a great job. There is that 10% that sometimes you may want to try and do something with it, and it doesn't have the capability. That is pretty rare and when it happens, typically they will send that to development, and development will come up with a solution.
It may take a little time for them because I'm sure they have a huge backlog of things, but it's not like they tell you it's something they're not going to do. Instead, they'll send it to the development team and explain that there is an issue that the customer wants to be corrected or a capability that they want to have added. At that point, it will go up the chain within their organization.
I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.
I work for a city government, and SpamTitan provides front-end protection for any incoming email. It scans for viruses or any malware that comes across the email. I also block some countries using geoblocking features in the software.
For example, since we don't do business with China, we block any emails coming from there because most of them try to do something malicious.
SpamTitan has led to a tremendous reduction in spam intake. Employees will enter their email when registering for a website, which gets sold off to a million places.
Since we implemented the solution in 2018, about 74 percent of our messages have come in clean, so 26 percent were spam or other rejected emails. That equals about 2 million clean messages and 600,000 emails that were geoblocked, flagged as spam, or otherwise rejected because of viruses or bad attachments.
SpamTitan has also improved our catch rate and reduced false positives relative to our previous solution. It's hard to say how much because I wasn't in that area of operations at the time, so I wasn't involved with our previous spam solution.
I'm not sure if it was a configuration issue, but the catch rate was probably the opposite. In other words, three-quarters of the mail coming through was spam and only a quarter was clean.
Implementing SpamTitan made our operations a lot more efficient because the users have accounts and can check for spam. If it's a false positive, they can release it and get the email. With the old system, they had to go to two different spam portals. It was convoluted, and I don't think too many people have used it.
It's hard for me to quantify the amount of time our employees save. I don't have those statistics. However, it saves time if your inbox isn't filled with spam. You don't need to waste time filtering through the junk. The city's communications through email have become a great deal more efficient, but I don't have statistics to back that up.
Our security has improved, as well. A virus hit the entire city government, and we believe the infection came through email. We reevaluated our products after that. We changed our antivirus and firewalls and switched our spam solution to SpamTitan. We changed almost every security product that we had to something better.
TitanSpam's security features keep malicious occurrences from coming, and the spam features prevent all the garbage from coming into our inboxes. And the geoblocking helps us automatically block email from regions we don't do business with.
The user interface is also highly user-friendly. I didn't know much about this system when we got it in 2018, but I could easily navigate it. It's intuitive and straightforward with tabs, so you can access the settings you need to get to.
They also let you customize it to match your organization's feel, so it looks like a product from your organization. I like when companies do that. Our city logo is on it when you log in to this system.
After we configured SpamTitan to our liking, it pretty much took care of itself. It even provides spam scores on all the emails that come in. You can determine the highest score you want to allow.
SpamTitan's logging features could be improved. The logs are hard to deal with because you need to download the log as a text file. Then you need to search through this text file to find what you need.
At the same time, I don't have too many problems, so I don't have to look in the logs that often. It doesn't bother me that much, but it would help if I could view these logs in a more user-friendly way.
We've been using SpamTitan since 2018.
SpamTitan is extremely stable. I've never had this system go down.
I would say that SpamTitan is highly scalable. I can see memory and CPU usage on the dashboard, and we have more than enough hardware to scale out as high as we need. I know they have packages with a lot more users than we deal with. We're running on about 500 users, but I don't think we would have a problem scaling from there. We don't have too much use for more. We only have about 900 employees here.
Many city employees don't use their official email accounts that much. For example, we have public works people out on the streets who hardly use email. My license usage went over the limit a few times, but it's not much. I think it's only 50 or 60 users.
I rate TitanHQ's support eight out of 10. They're highly knowledgeable about the product they have produced and resolve issues fairly quickly. I've had one or two issues in four years that required them to do something on their end.
They have remote support, so they can access the private cloud. I can enable remote support, so they can connect to it, look at the issue, and resolve it remotely. It's top-notch support. We've never had a problem with them. Everything gets resolved as quickly as possible.
I never had to deal with support for GFI MailEssentials, but I know that people in those positions struggled with their support at times, so I would say SpamTitan's customer service is much better than competitors.
Positive
We were using another product called GFI MailEssentials, and the difference between SpamTitan is like night and day. We had all kinds of malware go into our inboxes, so we needed to sift through it to get to the real meat of the issue.
We function better with this product because we don't have any downtime. We haven't had any virus infections since implementing SpamTitan. We took a massive hit with GFI MailEssentials, and it took our entire network down. We had to rebuild everything manually, so we did a lot of research to find a better solution. This is what we landed on after months of research.
The deployment was relatively fast. It took a little bit of time to spin up the private cloud and around a week to deploy SpamTitan. I'd say it took about two weeks from start to finish.
The maintenance and configuration are straightforward. I configured this solution back in 2018, so it's been close to four years. I do updates and other tweaks periodically. I might change some allowlists, but it requires little involvement after the setup. It pretty much runs itself.
I worked directly with SpamTitan and implemented the solution.
We've definitely seen a return. When that security incident happened in 2017, I can't even tell you how much that cost us. There was a lot of downtime. I'm sure it was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. SpamTitan costs less than $5,000 a year. It's worth it to keep us out of those situations.
We pay around $4,200 for a license, so it doesn't come out to that much per user. It's about $8.40 per user annually. You just can't beat that. I don't know if people negotiate that down further, but TitanHQ tried to raise the price on me after we had been using this solution for a year or two.
I told them we had already budgeted for the amount we've been paying for the past two years, so they agreed to keep the price the same. Maybe a customer could haggle for a better deal, but I think that's a pretty good price to protect one user from spam and viruses for a year.
I rate SpamTitan nine out of 10. I recommend trying it out. TitanHQ will work with you. I can't remember if I did a trial beforehand, but I know there were talks about spinning up a private cloud that we could try for 30 days. If they're willing to let you try it for a month, there's really nothing to lose. You can move on if you don't like it, and if you do, the solution's already in place, so you can start scaling it out.
In general, it's always good advice to research security products to make sure you have the best solution for your environment in place. Also, you need to make sure your products are up to date. Security updates are essential, and you should double-check your configurations.
For our clients who are big enough, and have the ability with their firewalls, we sometimes go in and put SpamTitan right on their firewalls. Or, if we are moving everybody to Office 365, then we use it that way with the Microsoft side of things. We also do a lot of refined stuff with that as well.
We have some clients who have been around for a long time, meaning that their domain has been out there for a while and they have had a high turnover of workers. A lot of them had huge amounts of spam coming in. When we were running the Exchange servers, they were being swamped before we had something like this solution put on. Once we put on SpamTitan, it was a big relief for me. I could sleep that night. Also, it took pressure off our infrastructure.
The deployment is fine. It works great. It is just one thing that we have to deal with, not a bunch of things. That makes it a lot easier than the way we were doing things before.
We had one company where we had to teach them about how SpamTitan works, even though the owner was teaching his employees not to open stuff and that they needed to be responsible. We then had to tell them what they have to do as well so they don't circumvent things as employees and users. One time, the owner actually opened up an email from Nigeria, and they are in Canada, where somebody was applying with a resume. It encrypted everything that they had. I asked him, "Why would you open up a resume? You're not looking to hire anybody. Why would you open something up from somewhere from someone you didn't know anything about?" This was a company that had satellite offices all around the region. It puts a lot of people out of work in a hurry. Having this type of solution put in afterwards helped a lot because they had been around for so long and had so much spam coming in. They had used their corporate emails to sign up for just about anything out there, so they were getting a lot of junk. We cut all that down, which was one of the things that has helped us.
Once we were able to put them on to SpamTitan, because they only deal within a local area, we put the geo-blocking feature on for Canada. This saved on a lot of that stuff that was coming into them. When we turned it on, they removed about 40% of the stuff that was coming in. The spam was coming from outside of their location. So, that was a big thing. The geo-blocking feature makes sense whenever you can do it. You can also scrub the outgoing mail so you can protect yourself from getting on a blacklist, in case something was going wrong on your side of the fence.
Another example, we have one company who wanted to make sure that credit cards and things like that were blocked. So, SpamTitan has things like that built-in.
With the ransomware stuff going on, especially with larger customers, they have to take this solution or we don't look after them. This is because we don't want our time and name dragged through the mud.
We now have tens of thousands of emails a day that we are logging for some of our customers.
Some clients don't want to know anything. Other clients like the fact that they have the opportunity to get this report. It comes in and shows them everything that has been collected. They can log in, manage all that at any time, and clean it. It is a safety net for them so they feel comfortable. In some cases, it actually helps in the education of the end user's infrastructure. You take them through and show them, and say, "You have some responsibilities and control here that you can manage. This is a top-level device to do this." Some of them really take pride in the fact that they can and want to do it. Therefore, it is a good tool that shows them why things are even being caught, how it appears, and why it is being picked up. The more that you can educate your end user, the safer you are keeping everybody.
We have just one place to go and look at things, which makes it a lot easier for us. Our users like the fact that it is granular when they look at it. Some guys are really proficient in certain areas and this lends itself to that, which is good. They can then learn the other parts that they didn't have when we were on other systems. You can just log into the back-end and can see everything or whatever you want to see. If you need to actually go through the email and look for one to release, it is easy to find.
When the client gets it, we show them how they get daily reports. SpamTitan is easy for them to use and they can manage their own spam.
There is a built-in antivirus, we keep that turned on. It is really great.
We have set the attachment filters for inbound and outbound. We educate our people about attachments coming in. They will say that so-and-so sent us something, but it didn't come through. Well, it is not going to come through.
They have a huge amount of things that we haven't even probably thought about.
We aren't trying to develop software. We just want something to use. However, when you get into it, you can control the RBL servers as well as add ones to it, if you want to. There is your Sender Policy Framework (SPF), which is good because a lot of government agencies started using it. It is great that you can use it yourself and keep things compliant.
There are top-level domains if you want to start blocking at that level. You have all kinds of granular things.
There are SMTP controls.
I don't have to go into the server and do the updates. We just set the server to automatically stay updated by hour, week, etc.
You can turn on macro scanning, which is kind of neat.
We have the state-browsing database turned on that Google uses. We have that on ours.
The patterning filtering is neat. Once you start along the patterns, you can see what is going on. This will sort of help with that. It is kind of interesting to see how these patterns formulate, then all of a sudden, you see what is going to happen.
If you want to schedule and archive reports, it is great if you had to do an investigation down the road, then you can go back and look at that stuff. Because in those reports that you run, patterns will be there. Those things are really useful.
When someone is looking at it, they find it intuitive and easy to get around on the back-end to do what needs to be done.
Before, I didn't know what some of the things would do if turned on, i.e., things that we hadn't used previously. Now, I see that they give you further information on it and take you right to a web page. That is something that I wanted done before and can see that it is there now. I did check this just the other day. That would have been a complaint, but it is not now.
Sometimes, things can get caught back in spam that you had previously released. Without going in, releasing the whole domain, and opening it up, since you don't want to do that often because the company can get infected as well, I have a couple of things that I previously released show back up again. I don't understand why this is happening, but I would like to know why it happened, e.g., did an algorithm change? It is important to know if I released an email last week why it was caught in spam the following week.
We have been using the solution for close to six years.
The stability is very good. We haven't had any issues at all with any of it. Everything that we have had an issue with is either because Microsoft Servers or Amazon servers has done something temporarily, or we have done something ourselves. The uptime has been fantastic.
From our perspective, it is very scalable because we are not a huge company. Our clients are all over the place. We have government offices, small mom-and-pop businesses, etc. We are in every sector, whether it be the retail sector, legal, government, etc. We do it all. Because of where we are located, there are not that many people who can specialize in and cover big and small businesses or organizations. Therefore, we have to look after everybody in their area and know a lot of different things.
There are all kinds of blogs and alerts. If you want to set alerts for yourself, you can do that. I haven't used it. However, when we were setting it up, we wanted to know, depending on your growth, what would happen if we brought on another bigger customer and you moved us to another system? You won't have to go through the entire setup again. You can just put multiple servers together and cluster them, then you can do all your controls from one server.
Support is really good. Recently, they hired a new person. This person works with people like us to find out if we have any issues or things that we don't like about TitanHQ's solution, e.g., the way that they do business or their features. I can just send off an email and get a quick answer that is directed to the right people, which makes a big difference to me. That is one of the biggest things that they did lately that is really good.
I was frustrated with some of their million processes. Support got right in and straightened that all out. I know that they were probably amalgamating systems or something at the time. I'm not sure. However, that has all been sorted by one support person, and that makes my life a lot easier.
I would have rated support lower before. Everything used to be all siloed. You would go to either finance, support, licensing, etc. Now, I have somebody who will take it right to the top or to those departments, getting it straightened out. That is so important to me.
Right now, I can't complain about anything. I would now rate them as nine or 10 (out of 10). I can talk to my support person, Emma, first about something and find out whether I need to raise a ticket. I have a voice in the company that I never had before.
I like dealing with them because they are from Ireland. Sometimes, when I will call into major call centers, they are not personable. When you are talking to their staff from Ireland, it is a lot like talking to people in Canada. People are nice. I get that from all their levels, and I like that. I really do like that because I only get calls from clients when there is something wrong. So, everybody is always in a hyper state. When I call my backup support, they know that we are all working on the same level for the same thing. I am not greeted with someone thinking, "Do I really want to take this call or not?" They are polite and I am greeted with someone who is nice and genuinely wants to help.
This is a big thing because I have dealt with some companies who were bought and taken over on the security side. We just completely left them because of their support and the way that people treated you. It is a big difference in feeling that they are nice.
Positive
We were doing some stuff with Barracuda. We had them for a few years. We also had one of the bigger solutions out there at the time; it was one of the first ones that was out. With the pricing model, I never knew where I really stood. It is alright if you have huge clients who warranted their stuff, but when we first started, we didn't have huge clients that wanted their solution. Instead, we had smaller clients. It helped us when we moved to this market with SpamTitan. I also knew where my costs were coming from. So, it was a little bit of a different move. A lot of people go to these solutions because they have huge clients at first. We didn't have huge clients at first, so it was a different way of getting into this business.
Once we moved to SpamTitan, we then looked at their other stuff, moving to ArcTitan and WebTitan as well. We use all of TitanHQ's platforms. It is a really nice system, as far as we are concerned.
It is very easy to set up. It didn't take long at all.
We worked with the TitanHQ team when we did the initial setup. They explained everything to us, e.g., if we wanted something on, if we didn't want it on, at what level, and how granular. That was good. When you are going with a new company, there is no way that you can know everything that you need to know about all of that. Something that is this important, you need to allow the experts to help you go through the steps, then you can go back to it on your own.
Because the guys who are doing this on my side of the fence are in and out of it all the time, working with clients and checking on stuff, we are able to reveal the whole email without harming anything. We can look and see the entire background of where it came from and follow that through.
SpamTitan has helped us big time with improving our spam catch rate and reduced our false positive rate. This took a lot of weight off our shoulders because we were spending a lot of time managing the Exchange servers.
When you are looking at what they were processing before people started using these cloud-type solutions, it really has made a big difference for us on the administration side. For example, when there is an attack going around the world, such as the ones on the news, that is a lot of sleep you can lose in a hurry from our perspective behind the scenes if you know certain clients who don't have this type of solution.
All our clients warrant this type of solution. We just won't allow them to work with us unless we put these types of solutions in place, because it is too nerve-wracking. It only takes one client to decide that they don't want this, then they get infected, it affects all your staff and other clients, and then you have to spend time trying to get them back up and going again when something like this could have prevented it.
We have taken clients in and shown them how much email has been coming through. When showing them the back-end of it, e.g., the blocking and numbers, they are like, "Oh my God." Sometimes we will take a particular email and show them how much is coming through on that. We then tell them, "When you sign up for something and you use the corporate email, this is what can happen."
When it comes to the scalability of it, it really doesn't matter much because of the way that it is priced. You can put it on somebody who is small or big. I am not big enough to worry about growing out of anything that they are doing. You can put it on a different server for a bigger client, and that is not a big problem. I can still manage it from one place.
We looked at different platforms. We wanted to get into something that was intuitive on the back-end and where everything was visible from one place.
We were the first ones for whom ArcTitan put in a Canadian server. We required mail archiving, but it had to be done in Canada because of client requirements. I couldn't find anybody in Canada that had a mail archiving server in Canada at the time, so I told ArcTitan about it. They said, "Okay, you are a customer of ours already on SpamTitan, so we will." So they flamed up a server in Canada and put it on Canadian soil, which is what we needed. We didn't have that anywhere else. Just the fact that they did that for us, and we were the first ones, it took about a month for things to get all done, but it was done. We were able to strike the Canadian server and put it on. I thought, "These people do want to do business. They care." That was great and I was impressed.
When I am talking to a client, I tell them we will be using SpamTitan. If they are a big company and require that their mail gets archived, then I also tell them about ArcTitan.
If you are starting off, do not worry because TitanHQ will help you set it up. Once it is there, if you have never used one before, it is no big deal. Once set up, you can look at it and read about it. You can see how it all works together. You get to see the movement of everything happening. You will soon understand it. It is not hard. It does have a lot of granular stuff, but only when you want to get into that does it matter. When you look at it, you get to understand it. It is like putting the furniture in the room is much easier to understand than when you are trying to picture it when there is nothing there.
For anybody who demands high-end control, I don't know what is not there. Everything seems to be all in place. I know that they are now using the new technology that is coming out, e.g., where you have the AI do some stuff.
You have some heavy-duty professionals running a global company to try and protect it and all these people. It makes me feel good that somebody big enough is doing this and they just don't hang their coat on the spam mail. They are doing archiving, where you have to understand another process - mail servers. They are also doing the web side of things.
I would rate them as nine out of 10. The only reason that I am not giving 10 is because two years ago I would have given them a lower rating for being siloed. Since Emma has bridged all their departments for us, that has changed and been turned around.
We use it to provide 100% spam protection for us as well as all of our clients. It is ultimately part of our layered security approach since not one thing can do it all. You need a lot of stuff. Therefore, they are a part of that solution.
The way that we are structured in our go-to-market strategy, this solution is part of a whole host of things. Though it is typically not the forerunner since spam is not a major forerunner, but if it is definitely a thing to be on the table, then they would be at the meetings and helping us to land deals. Security, in general, is typically something that is part of our go-to-market strategy. At that point, people want to hear about the layers of security and the fact that we have a spam filter and how that integrates with other components of monitoring their network.
Every company and person will experience spam differently because everyone interacts with accounts, emails, subscriptions, and websites much differently. From my perspective, for the five years we have been on it, I have never had a problem. I don't even know where those spam/ham buttons really are on my computer. It does exactly what I need. I don't say, "Oh. I didn't get that. Let me go check my spam." That doesn't really exist. I literally can think of one time in five years where I have said that. Then, the person sending me the email was sending a very spammy email from a mailing list type software. It was no wonder it got caught, and it was his fault. As far as the product goes, it is really good. I am sure some of our clients also don't understand how to articulate that. For them, they don't think it adds much. We do hear that noise and have to consider that as part of a product that we are going to have in our suite offering. As far as the false positives go, it is fairly solid.
In the last year, I had one company with whom we never do business. He is a painter who came to paint our office. He emailed an invoice and it went to my spam box. I texted him. I am like, "Hey, am I getting an invoice?" He was like, "I sent it." So, in a whole year, I have spent three minutes managing my spam, which is next to nothing.
SpamTitan’s geo-blocking feature helps allow us to block spam emails entering our network and servers, reducing our spam intake. We use this feature regularly because we have customers who have offices around the globe. Especially before COVID when it was safe to travel, people (from our customers) were always circumnavigating the globe. Being able to either turn it on for temporary usage or block it altogether, that versatility was a key feature that we needed. This feature is perfect for us. It gives us everything we need. Everything has been versatile enough for us in terms of allowing exceptions based on trusted vendors' ID, IP, domain, or email address.
I would rate the overall intuitiveness as eight out of 10. It is not that bad. There are just a few things. I don't know if it is a limitation of Microsoft or just a limitation of the design. There is a spam/ham button that they have. I love it, but it is not necessarily as intuitive. It is a bit tongue-in-cheek as far as a marketing ploy of good versus bad: fake being spam and good being ham. Most people who are already super self-conscious about their computers, knowledge, and skillset, they don't know what that means. To me, I love it. I think it is hilarious and clever, but I don't think it is that great for the intuitiveness of people who don't use it regularly. Those menus and options are buried in the ribbon on a separate add-in feature page versus where McAfee and other solutions used to bolt in right on your main email page. Anytime that you need to click two or three times to do something, that is always a pain in the ass. It would be nice if they had something where you could click right away in front of you and the buttons would be, "Mark as spam. Mark as good." Or, something like that, but it is their business decision.
The overall GUI is utilitarian. It has a spreadsheet feel versus a nice software that is guided. I am sure they're going to improve it over time. It could look a little prettier. It needs some lipstick. They should get rid of unfamiliar words like ham and spam, helping the user to better understand what they are clicking through.
For the couple of clients who have those unique needs that don't do business the way we do or have emails as clean as us, we have just turned off the actual spam quarantine boxes. I am finding that we are starting to do that more often, where the mail will just get forwarded through to junk with a subject line like, "***Spam****," and then the message. Having it quarantined and held in their online part makes it very tough to go check right away. You need to do multiple clicks plus sign-in. No one remembers their sign-in accounts. You need to go find an old email, which is just not great.
If I want quarantine reports sent to me, then I get them all at 3:00 AM. As opposed to getting one sent to me every hour, then I can go check if there is something rather than delivering the malicious emails or spam. That would be something of improvement. It is just a better way to fine-tune or dial-in on reports.
Thousands of our customers really don't like the reports. They can't fine-tune or adjust when they get delivered. They have a lot of spam senders, e.g., newsletters, where they are expecting whomever they are dealing with to send them invoices, quotes, etc. This creates a whole bunch of flags of why it would be counted as spam. Logically, it all makes sense. They are not going to go buy a new ERP system for something like that. However, our customer is now super frustrated because they are now getting penalties on late payments or different things because the invoice went to their spam box.
It is easy to white label, but the damage was already done because they went and got a new vendor. They already did something else without us knowing, so there is no way to know that we have to white label it. We hear quite a bit of noise from our customers as far as just how they have to interact and manage spam.
We have been using it for more than five years.
The stability has been the same versus other security solutions that we have used. The solution is always, but so were the other solutions that I previously used.
Their services are awesome so we don't have a lot of problems with spam and viruses plaguing our customers. However, if and when something happens, they are phenomenal with their support who help and get involved. They don't make it our problem. I don't think they have ever said, "No," to us for anything.
Their tech support is awesome. When I was directly working with the techs, I would often reference SpamTitan's support as a way to parallel or mirror some of the things that we were trying to strengthen in our own support. I would rate them as nine out of 10 since there is always room for improvement.
I only hear about when things are not going very well or meeting our expected SLAs. I hear about other vendors, and it is like, "They suck. They never get back to us." I get the customer complaints about certain things, Microsoft being one of them, where things are not getting fixed and we are waiting on the vendor. Then, I have to get involved and talk to clients, give credits, etc. because Microsoft is taking forever.
From my perspective, I know that SpamTitan has never been a problem for us or had those types of escalations. Therefore, they are performing very well.
Our tickets are usually done within an hour or less. This means we can work with the customer, reach out to a vendor, get support, and help the customer all within 60 minutes.
Positive
We first came to the solution because of an amazing sales guy named Marc Ludden at SpamTitan. I met him a long time ago. Since then, he has been promoted two or three times. I met him at a conference and we were just talking about their spam solution versus what we were currently doing. His charismatic approach and upfront promises of how things would be better seemed intriguing. For the price point, we were like, "Well, if this is even remotely close to what he is offering for this price, it is worth the risk to try them out." It was a bit of a, "Let's give this a go," and they have never let us down and we have never looked back.
Its savings for quality and service are hands-down the number one reason that we switched. I don't feel we have compromised any quality or service for our spam product. We went from using Barracuda, AppRiver, and McAfee. With TitanHQ's personable approach and boutique customer care, that is where we see a huge difference.
It is a very simple tool. Some of those other solutions are very complicated and convoluted to manage. Whereas, this is very simple and easy. It has afforded us a margin when it comes to, not just money, but the actual ability to manage a network through projects or disasters.
The setup and configuration were super easy. Even if it was "difficult" as far as the complexity of what needed to get done, they helped.
When you are new, they hold your hand as long and as much as you want. They did our first few deployments, then we finally said, "You know what? I think we have got this," and we started to tell them that we won't call them for deployments anymore, but they are always there to help and still are to this day. Even though we are not new, and every time we call them, there is never a thing they won't do for us.
Our pricing has pretty much stayed somewhat the same. Sure, there has been an increase or two that keeps up with inflation, but that is everybody. When we switched from AppRiver to SpamTitan, we saved about 20%. That is $1,000 to $2,000 a month. We went to SpamTitan and WebTitan. It was $1,000 savings a month for SpamTitan and another $1,500 a month savings for WebTitan.
Their superior service comes at a very cost-effective price. This is the biggest part that really allows us to remain competitive. Their pricing for us has just been great. They have helped us to be where we need to be. They really do partner with us in that way so we can get more business. They provide the right pricing, which lets us remain competitive.
We have tried and tested Microsoft O365 spam filters, just native without any third-party, as well as the Clutter box. That was a nightmare. There is definitely a reason why third-party spam providers exist versus just using what is built into O365. SpamTitan is one of those reasons.
Customers almost don't care which spam filter it is. Almost, because it sometimes does come up, and they will say, "Who are you using?" However, we typically don't even get, "Who are you using?" Usually, if that person is technical at that other organization, that is when they're just curious. Typically, people don't even ask us what type of tools we are bringing. They just want the end result recipe of a calm network.
The geo-blocking feature is important for us. Though, it is hard to always get it perfect. That is for any provider with geofencing because you don't always get control over where Internet traffic flows from or through, or where they are running from. IPs are a little bit better, but we don't always know what hotel people are in.
They are very good. I would rate them as 10 out of 10 because there is always room for improvement.
It's the only product we use for filtering spam and viruses, et cetera.
The fact that it blocks most of the spam—and about 75 percent of all emails coming in is spam—is a great help. We still have some spam emails that pass through because they are more and more complex, but when we need help to configure the solution, TitanHQ is always there to help with an issue that we may have.
It definitely helps save employees' time. Having to sort through junk email was becoming a problem. Most of our users rarely get spam now. We also don't have to worry about them deleting something that is valid because. When you have too much junk, you may also delete stuff that is not junk.
The spam filtering is the most valuable part. When we first started using it, 15 years ago, there weren't many solutions that worked well, were user-friendly, and powerful.
We do have a few users, like the president of our organization, whose email address is everywhere, who still get some spam and we can't really block it because it's always coming from different addresses.
Also, it's a bit complex, but if you want a lot of features, it has to be kind of complex, and they have good support. When you can't find something, they help you to find it.
SpamTitan doesn't allow you to customize the time reports are sent. Sometimes our users would prefer that it come at a certain time, like 7:00 am so they can make sure they didn't miss anything from the day before. Currently, it can come in the middle of the day and probably depends on the server's restart or the setting change.
I have been using SpamTitan for at least 15 years.
The stability is very good. We have never had any issues with its stability.
We used previous solutions a long time ago, but the stability of SpamTitan versus them is better because, now, everything is virtual. At that time, most solutions were on-premises, but SpamTitan had the virtual appliance from the beginning, so it was better. Getting email is one of the most important things for our company.
The scalability is very good too. You just need licenses for the number of users that you have.
I have contacted their technical support several times. They're very good.
I don't have a competing solution, but their support is very good compared to the support we get for other products, who have their support based in India. It's definitely better. They always know what they're talking about and they provide a quick response. Even if it's something that you are doing wrong, they don't just try to close the case, they try to resolve your issue.
Positive
We used a free product and we also used a Norton product for some time, but it wasn't working as well as SpamTitan does. It was a consultant who worked for us who told me about the product and I tried it and it was definitely better than all the other ones that we tried before.
SpamTitan delivered performance and the price was quite good. I haven't compared it recently, and the price has increased in recent years, but the price and performance, at the time, were the key factors.
The initial deployment was pretty easy. The fact that it's easy to install was only of average importance when deciding to use the solution. I do everything regarding IT in our organization. If it's complex, it's still only going to be installed once, and then you just update it. There isn't much maintenance or involvement with it and we don't need a lot of people to know the solution.
I did it myself.
For the service, the pricing is reasonable.
We don't use other solutions so we can't really compare.
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.
The big problem is that many companies have a very basic IT setup. They can improve security at the foundational level at least. Any product like SpamTitan will do much better because most of the issues will be removed.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.