TitanHQ SpamTitan Reviews

Within our company umbrella, there are three companies under us, with everything from sales to marketing to customer interaction, both inbound and outbound. Anytime that we receive any type of email, it gets filtered through SpamTitan. 

The way that we have it set up is to filter keywords, in addition to its artificial learning capabilities. If something looks like it was written by a human, it will allow it to pass through, unless it throws some kind of flag that something looks suspicious. In general, it simply routes emails to our employees, giving us warnings if there is anything suspicious that we need to know about before those emails actually are received.

We use the cloud version of the solution, we don't have an onsite server. We have multiple companies within my company, but we've set them all up to route through SpamTitan.

We started with SpamTitan a couple of months after I started with this company. Up until then, we didn't have a spam filter solution. All the junk marketing emails would make it to every single person's inbox. People were having to filter through all the junk while also trying to find and respond to emails from customers in a decent amount of time. They were getting more spam and fake emails with malicious attachments than actual customer emails. The amount of time that everybody was spending just deleting junk and trying to actually find customer emails was excessive.

Since starting with SpamTitan, though, we hardly ever have any emails that were malicious or that were from random domains that are known to be used for spam. Anything that comes through that it thinks is malicious, but it's not 100 percent sure, will be placed in quarantine for each user. It will give them a daily, automatic report saying, "We have these in quarantine. If they look good to you, you can release them, and you'll immediately get them in your inbox."

As a result, we do not have to delete all the spam from our inboxes. It allows us to only see the most important ones that are questionable, so we're not digging through hundreds of emails a day from junk addresses. When compared to before we got SpamTitan three and a half years ago, hours a week are now being saved for every single employee. They no longer have to dig through junk. At the end of 2021, when I ran our yearly report, it automatically blocked over 250,000 bad emails that weren't from customers or had malicious attachments.

If we saved, say, 30 seconds for every one of those 250,000 emails that were stopped, we saved that much time, minimum. Our inboxes don't reach capacity from the junk that should have never reached us to begin with. As a company, we've saved so much money by not having to spend time dealing with that.

The geo-blocking feature definitely reduces our spam intake. The last time that I checked just geo-IP blocking, we had about 12,000 emails that attempted to come through in the last six months and were immediately stopped. They were stopped because we don't do business with them or have any connections with them.

The filter rules are valuable. The software itself will automatically filter out things that it thinks are suspicious. However, the filter rules are the most helpful because, if we need to, we can block entire domains and subdomains with the click of a button. In addition, if one specific email address is a problem, but not the entire domain, we can drill down and specifically block it without affecting anyone else in that domain.

They also have something called Pattern Filtering, which has been a godsend. While the software can only do so much, as far as detecting things that look suspicious based on what it's seen from all of its users, with Pattern Filtering I can use my own terminology or search terms. For example, if I don't want any email to ever come through that has the term "hot dog" in it, whether it be in the subject, the title, or anywhere else, I can immediately block such emails, company-wide. That has saved me so much time. It also works for blocking specific document types or file types. All it takes on my end is going into the Pattern Filtering and selecting what I don't want to come through or what I want to go into quarantine, to warn me first before we allow it through. It's one of the most helpful, but also one of the easiest-to-use features, that does the most for our company. It has saved me hours of work a month when it comes to filtering out all the new stuff that keeps coming in from different countries and scammers.

When we started, geo-blocking wasn't a feature but they added it within the last two years. I also do a lot of network security for our company. If there is a specific country that we don't do business with and from which we're getting a lot of requests, or if we have multiple attacks coming in a specific country, or if we keep getting a lot of emails from the same IP subnet from a certain country, instead of having to block every single new IP that comes in from that country, I can literally just block the country and any IP that tries to send us mail is immediately stopped, which is fantastic.

Those features are the ones we use the most, and they're also the most helpful for filtering out the most junk. And a lot of that is done automatically, once it starts detecting our blocking patterns and the stuff we aren't allowing to come through. With the subset of those things that do actually get through, because the senders either found better ways to mask what they're trying to do or they're sending stuff from different IPs that weren't blocked originally, I can just go into the solution and block them. Including login time and getting to the screen, I could have an IP address or an entire country blocked in less than two minutes.

In addition, the UI is not extremely flashy, which is fine for the people who need to be in the online console and determine what gets blocked and what gets released. It's very straightforward without animations or graphics. It has tabs that you click on that say, "If you click here, this is what you're dealing with." The usability is fantastic. It doesn't give me more than I need so I don't have to drill down through 20 different windows before I get to what I want. I actually appreciate the fact that it's as simple as it is.

Another good feature is that you can see how much is being blocked based on date ranges.

The only thing that threw me off a little bit, when it first came out, was Pattern Filtering. There didn't seem to be a huge amount of documentation on how to properly use it. If you want to block the term "hot dog," it's pretty straightforward. You just select, "If the email contains this phrase, block it for everyone." 

But, if you want to block an email address with .com.biz, which seems like it's legit but that .biz at the end throws it off, you have to get a little more detailed regarding how you type out what the Pattern Filtering feature looks for. You can't just enter ".com.biz" because it will then block everything that has .com or .biz in it. It takes a little more regex coding.

If they had a little more documentation explaining how to use regex, or if they could include that inside of the cloud interface so that it generates regex code based on the parameters you input, that would be a lot more useful for people who aren't familiar with coding languages and HTML. When you use it for a while, you get used to it, and you understand what it is that the pattern filter is looking for, but a regular user who doesn't know anything about regex has to learn what it is which can be a little daunting for people completely unfamiliar with the concept.

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

I have never once had an issue where the software went down or stopped routing our emails. There has never once been an occasion where TitanHQ has said, "We're going to do maintenance," or "We're not going to be able to route your emails." In two and a half years, it's never stopped working once, not even for five minutes. It's one of the most stable solutions that we use, company-wide.

Scaling is extremely simple. When we started, they asked us how many users we would have. SpamTitan detects whether we are under that number of users. But it has never stopped us. We once went over the number of licensed users. We talked to them and said, "We added new employees, we need to up our license," and they did that instantly. There was no waiting and we didn't have to go through renewing the contract. We didn't have to change any settings and we didn't have to reroute anything again. They added more users and it just kept working. Scaling is super-easy, and the solution can accommodate as many people as you need.

With all of our sub-companies, we have about 150 users of the solution.

We use it literally every day for filtering everything. The cool thing about it is that once it's set up and it's running the way you need it to, you hardly even need to log in, unless somebody tried to send an email and it didn't show up immediately. If that email didn't hit the spam filter, then you just have to tell whoever sent the email to try again. Other than that, it just works.

In the future, if we open more locations or we hire new employees, we'll absolutely increase how many users are using the software because it's invaluable to us.

I come from an MSP background. I took over the director of IT role in this company when I started here. With companies that I used in the past, if there was an issue with something that was not set up right or it was not filtering correctly, you would have to either submit a ticket or call. You would wait on hold and hope that the rep who talks to you is either knowledgeable enough to help you or wait again to be transferred to tier-one, two, or three support, until somebody was able to solve the problem.

The best thing about support with SpamTitan is that if I have an issue and I email them, I will normally get a response in 30 minutes if it's not a serious problem. But if I call them—and I have never had a company do this before—I always seem to talk to the same people; not the team, but literally the same people every time. If I had a problem a couple months ago, and then I have a new problem, I'm talking to the same person that I spoke with months ago, and they're familiar with what's happened in the past and they remember my setup. It seems like the most personalized software support that I've ever experienced. I'm not constantly worried that I'm going to have somebody who isn't able to help me when I call. With TitanHQ, the person I call and talk to is the person that is solving my problem, every single time.

It honestly feels like the people who are helping me either use the software themselves, and have from the beginning, or they helped engineer and develop the software. They're able to fix my problem in minutes, versus several phone calls or having to worry about getting transferred around. That's awesome.

In a previous job, the company I worked for used Barracuda. That was an onsite spam filtering service. It was fine, although it took a lot more setup and a lot more hands-on work to get it to work the way that I needed it to. If there ever was a problem, either with the hardware or software updates, I would have to call somebody in support who knows what they're doing or wait for somebody to give me a callback and help me fix the problem. In a business, when you have people sending you contracts or sales orders and invoices and there's a problem that is stopping email from coming through, if you can't get help immediately and you lose those emails, it really hurts your company. I had issues like that with Barracuda.

Before Barracuda, we had something that was used to help filter spam and has since become Cisco hardware. It almost feels like the companies were too big to give customers personalized support when they needed it. It was as if they had grown beyond what their support teams could handle. With SpamTitan, I've never once had the feeling that they're taking on more than they can handle.

We looked at Barracuda and Cisco and went through a few demos. Believe it or not, we actually found SpamTitan through Reddit, via several IT channels that I was a member of. Somebody from TitanHQ answered a lot of my questions through Reddit and offered us a demo. We did the demo and it did everything we needed it to do, without a ton of input from us or having to spend days to get it set up and working. The fact that it worked out-of-the-box, meant we went directly from the demo to signing on with the company. We've loved it ever since.

The demo setup that we had tried to do before SpamTitan was insane. We did less to get everything working with SpamTitan than we did with all of these other companies' spam filtering demos. Demos are supposed to be easy and attract customers. You want to show people that your stuff works with the easiest onboarding possible. The only company that was able to do that and show us that their solution worked without a setup headache was SpamTitan. That's why we stuck with them.

It's one of the easiest setups that we've ever done. We just set our mail to route through SpamTitan and it auto-detected our email addresses. That's all it took. The software took care of everything else for us. There was no complicated setup. Our domain goes through the solution first. It detects the users that we have, sets them all up separately, and filters from there. We set up how strict we wanted it to be and let it learn over the first month. We manage everything through their website.

From the time that we were told to change where our mail is routed to, until it was actually successfully routing our emails to SpamTitan, it took about five minutes to set up.

Because we were unfamiliar with the software, we waited until our company was closed, and we weren't expecting any emails, to implement it. We did it on a weekend when we don't get a lot of customer emails. I spoke with somebody from SpamTitan and they told me where I needed to change our routing to. We logged into our domain, changed our MX record to route to SpamTitan, and everything else just took care of itself after that.

When we first started, there was a test mode and it would ask me, as the administrator, what was okay to let through. It would learn, based on my preferences, what it is that we were looking to block. After that first month of using SpamTitan, we now get a maximum of three false positives, company-wide, a week. Most of the time, the ones that get caught in the quarantine but that should have come through have a PDF attached or something has a really sketchy name, like a bunch of numbers, or it has "exe", even if it's not a .exe file but has the word "executive". But it lets us know that it was flagged so that way we have the ability to release it.

Not having to completely recover the company from a malware attack or from something that came in through email, and not having to worry about employees clicking on malicious links, are themselves, aspects of a return on investment. One malicious email with a bad attachment, or with a link that leads to a bad attachment, is enough to take an entire network down. 

Also, the fact that our firewall hasn't been working as hard since we got the spam filter, speaks for itself regarding how valuable the software is. 

If one software implementation can stop 90 percent of the problems in a company, when it comes to malware and malicious actors; if it can do that much and take the workload off of everything else in the company, then it's worth it a million times over.

And the time that we all save not having to dig through all the junk or worrying about whether we are going to click on something we shouldn't click on allows all of us to focus more on our actual tasks. We don't have to devote so much of our day to digging through and deleting junk emails, just to get to the stuff we actually need to do our jobs. That is also return on our investment. The amount of time SpamTitan has saved us is definitely worth it.

When we started with this company they had fewer features. Neither the geo-IP blocking was available, nor was the Pattern Blocking. But throughout the three and a half years that we've been with them, they've added them, and they have not increased our cost. They've not even asked us to sign on for additional features. They just added them to their product and they were available for us to use. Having the same costs that we've been paying and having new features added is awesome. They give you an update without charging you more for it. I like that a lot. It makes you feel appreciated as a customer.

If you're considering SpamTitan, get a feel for the software during the demo that they offer. If there is anything that you're not 100 percent certain about in terms of how it works or what its function is, call the support people and they'll explain it to you and make sure that you understand what it's supposed to do and how it works. That will let you know that the support people are there to help you, but it also makes sure that you understand the software that you're considering paying for. The demo will show you how much their software is actually able to do, while asking questions of their support staff will also show you how attentive and personal the support is. That way, you're getting the most out of determining if you want to actually use the software.

Lean on the support staff, because that's what they're there for. They will let you know that if you need anything, they're always there to help, no matter how small or big the question or problem might be.

The biggest lesson I've learned from using the solution is that I should have gotten it a lot sooner. The sooner you use the solution, the more time you'll have for everything else in your company.

Given all the spam filters that I've used, this is by far the easiest to use and the most detailed. At least give it a try, before you make a decision.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neutral

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We primarily use this product to filter spam and other unwanted emails as well as protect our users from malicious links.

We have an enterprise environment. We opted to use an on-premises version installed on a VM that runs the SpamTitan software.

Optionally, we could have implemented the web version. However, given that we wanted it on-premises and it was cheaper in our case.

SpamTitan will be included in any substantial infrastructure changes going forward due to the easy fit and value provided. 

SpamTitan has improved our organization because it does a better job at filtering spam from getting in, along with the many phishing attempts. Be it widespread or just spearphishing, it recognizes and quarantines them.

Link Lock is a big deal because we were having people click on stuff and just go anywhere, and it has solved all of that.

Using this solution has saved our general user time by not having to sort through junk mail. This is not the case for me, however, because I have to go in and filter the mail, but that's why the product was created.

From the everyday user standpoint, it's great because it stops all of the spam, all of the flyers, all of the advertising, and anything we don't want going into the system. It works great for that purpose.

The most valuable feature is the Link Lock, which prevents our users from clicking on links that haven't been verified. This is the feature that sold us on the product. We already had an anti-spam engine, but it didn't have that feature, and SpamTitan is what solved that problem for us.

The interface is easy to learn and easy to use, even for beginners that know nothing about the product. One can just pick it up and go.

The sensitivity of the setup that determines what's spam and what isn't, including the scoring in order to quarantine, block, or allow emails, is well done.

When in the control panel, the context menu that appears when you right-click on an email should present options for adding the sender to the whitelist or blocking them. If we installed the Outlook plugin for our users then it could be done using that. However, we don't install that plugin because it will complicate their lives. Using a context-menu selection should be as effective as going in to manually add it.

As it is now, I have to have three different tabs open with the control panel. One is the dashboard, another is watching quarantine, and there is a third one for adding people to either the allow or block lists. Having the ability to right-click and bring up a context menu would be the best answer in that case.

I have been using TitanHQ SpamTitan for nearly one year.

Stability-wise, it's great. This is a product that works. It does what it says it's going to do and it does it well. We don't have any issues with it at all.

Scalability is just a matter of the license. We're licensed for perhaps 250 email accounts and we're not hitting that yet. We have approximately 170, so it will scale just fine.

If we hit that cap, then it'll be seamless. They'll just issue us a new license, we'll pay a little more money, and we'll be fine.

The technical support team is quick to answer and they're very helpful. As soon as you learn their procedures, it's very simple and very straightforward.

I would rate the support a nine out of ten. We're pretty happy with it but nobody is a ten.

Positive

Prior to this solution, we were using GFI Mail Essentials.

When we were speaking with a representative, this person had not had much interaction with GFI. He suggested that SpamTitan is an up-to-date and modern solution, which is what caused me to look into it.

It's more cost-effective, and it has the Link Lock feature, so that's the direction that we went in. In fact, we signed on to use the product several months before the Link Lock feature was released.

Another difference with SpamTitan is that it's simpler to use. It's much easier to move around in the interface without having to expand menu after menu. It was very cluttered and cumbersome to use GFI.

The service and customer support that I receive from SpamTitan are excellent.

The initial setup is straightforward.

It was important to us that the solution was simple and straightforward to set up. We did have to create a VM, but they gave us guidelines for that. Everything was there and it was simple to do.

Had it not been straightforward then I would have had support available to help me. I didn't need support for the initial setup but they did assist us during the configuration. There were some very specific filters that we wanted in place, which is really just customization for our environment.

I was responsible for implementing the system. I searched out the product, spoke with the rep, made the deal, installed it, set it up, and configured it. There were no other staff involved in the deployment.

We get everything straight from SpamTitan headquarters in Ireland.

Our return on investment comes from not having to spend hours cleaning out the mail server, including all of the spam that used to be going to people. With all of the flyers and advertisements that come via email, we were constantly adding to the block list. Now, we no longer have to do that. Users have to spend less time managing their Inboxes.

Price-wise, this product is very compatible with our budget.

Beyond comparing it to GFI, we did evaluate other options but SpamTitan fit every need. We had some knowledge of Barracuda; the spam engine worked well but it was too expensive. This is something that we considered, but nobody could deal with Link Locks. As such, we didn't want to go elsewhere.

SpamTitan has a geo-blocking feature but we don't have a call to use it.

This is a product that I recommend. They really take care of everything and there's nothing that you need. We're quite happy with it and if service and support are important to you, they're right there on top of it.

They don't just sell you something and let you fend for yourself with a "do it yourself" guide. They do have that option, and it's very detailed and well done, but they will deal with you one on one and help you to resolve anything that you want. They will answer any of your questions and help you to configure the system.

In summary, there are several features that I like and it works well.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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.

It is a spam appliance. We're using it in front of our server. It only covers one mail server, and it does the scanning of all of our incoming mail. 

In terms of its version, we're always up to date. It is the newest version. We have it set to auto-update.

When we bought this solution, we were looking for 100% security, and it provides that. We also tried other solutions. As far as we're concerned, it's even better than Barracuda.

It has saved employees’ time by not having to sort through junk and spam emails. It is hard to define the time saved because each mailbox is unique to itself and what the user has been doing online, but overall, it would have saved hours.

The mail scanning is most valuable. They've been very good. We've used other ones, and everything else seems to be substandard than this.

The other thing that I found helpful with SpamTitan was the ability to import rules from other appliances.

The ability to contact their tech support and have them build in custom rules for us is also very important. For instance, somebody submitted a staff member's email address to some spam, and he was getting hundreds a day. They created a custom rule set for that mailbox. That really helped to stabilize the app. It saved hours in going through all those emails daily, which is a huge waste of time. Emails are critical, and if your mailbox starts to get spammed and they're blowing through these predefined rules, you need somebody there to help build custom rules. That's exactly what they did.

I've been involved with other solutions, and I've been through the interfaces of Barracuda. I have also tried some free appliances, and I feel that its interface, once you get used to the lingo, is good. It is very easy to use, at least for me. They're doing pretty good.

We're so used to it now. If anything, there should be more ease of access for the users. If you're on our mail server, there should be easier access for you to better manage your own mailbox.

We probably have been using this solution since 2014.

My impression of its stability is very high because we don't have any problems. It is ahead of others in terms of stability. The only time we've had a problem was when the hardware on the appliance crashed. 

Its scalability is really good. In comparison to others, it is very scalable for what we need in the environment that we use.

Their support is good. Some time ago, they opened up support out of California, which is better. When we first started using SpamTitan, one of the biggest problems was the time differential from the UK to us. We have used the one in California quite a bit, and it has been good for us. 

In terms of expertise, attentiveness, and speed of response from TitanHQ's customer support team versus competing solutions' customer support team, hands down, they have got the best and the fastest response time, which is extremely important, especially when you're having any issues with the appliance and it is interfering with mail protocols.

Positive

It was a long time ago. We tried Barracuda, and there was another open-source one. We found too many inadequacies with Barracuda and its scanning. SpamTitan is considerably more accurate than Barracuda and the open-source one that we tried. The most important thing is the accuracy on the emails coming in. The ability to contact their tech support for custom rules is also valuable.

It was super easy. I was surprised. There was already a pre-built VM, so we just used the virtual disk, created the VM on our side, attached it, and then we went through the command prompt setups. The command prompt setups pretty much tell you exactly what each step is.

It was me who did the deployment, but they assisted me too. I also take care of its maintenance.

In terms of maintenance, it requires a very minor amount of maintenance. We just do periodic FTP backups off-site. Besides that, there are just updates. There is not much more to do. Depending on what they've changed in the update, it usually requires a restart of the appliance.

We tried most open-source products that were free out there to save money, but we didn't mind paying the money after we had seen the glitches with them. We found that the open-source ones just couldn't handle the load of the number of mailboxes that we have. They just couldn't handle the load on it. The databases would continually crash, and then we'd have to start all over again. That's a lot of time and wasted effort. Especially when you're dealing with months of database building and then all of a sudden it crashes, you have to rebuild the appliance real quick and get it back online.

You need to have some networking knowledge for the ability to deploy it. You also have to understand the environment itself. Once you get in there and get going, it works very well. For me, it was actually fairly easy to understand. When we first deployed it, their consultant Patrick was very helpful in not just deploying it but also understanding how it works.

I would rate it a ten out of ten, especially after I've seen Barracuda.

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.

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.