TitanHQ SpamTitan Reviews

SpamTitan is the email filter we use to drastically reduce the amount of spam we get in our inboxes. We're deployed at two physical locations with several departments. Altogether, it's about 360 email accounts.

SpamTitan has freed up our employees to be more productive. They don't need to waste time sifting through a bunch of garbage emails. I'd say it's at least a 50 percent improvement. It has had a huge impact on our spam. You can go in every day and look at the amount of emails that are blocked. It's doing an outstanding job.

The safelist and blocklist are the best parts. If I've got a new contact coming in, I can safelist that domain or email address. Alternatively, I can block the domain or the email address if I'm getting harassed by someone. I like the ability to get down to that granular level if I need to block or allow an entire domain.

Emails from companies we work with often get flagged, and I have to go in and release them. For example, I made a hotel reservation today from Marriott that got blocked. I'm sure hotels spam people, but I wish there was a way to know that the email was to confirm my reservation and for it to allow that through.

We've been using SpamTitan for around two years.

We're pleased with SpamTitan's stability so far. We've had just zero issues with it. The stability is probably about the same, but the previous solution didn't catch spam the way SpamTitan does.

SpamTitan scales easily. 

TitanHQ's support is excellent. I rate them eight out of 10. 

Positive

We were using Office 365's built-in filter, but I needed something more robust. I did some research online and tried a SpamTitan demo. It seemed to do an excellent job, so we went with it.

Setting up SpamTitan is very straightforward, and it took a couple of days to deploy. You only need to make a couple of DNS changes, and it's ready to go. It doesn't require much maintenance after deployment. Occasionally, I go in and safelist an email or a domain when someone's expecting an email but not getting it. I check to see if the filter caught it. Once I mark it as safe, we don't have any more issues.

We leaned on SpamTitan's tech support to help us get up and running.

We have seen a return on investment.

I think the price is fair for the service we're getting.

We looked at other options, including McAfee. I can't remember the others, but I looked at about four or five options. Ultimately, it came down to price and performance.

I rate TitanHQ SpamTitan eight out of 10. When you deploy SpamTitan you should consider the filter sensitivity and how strict you want it to be. That may need to be tweaked with each individual organization. SpamTitan gives you a baseline of sensitivity to start with, and that number may need to be adjusted for your organization.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been an avid user for seven years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

The initial deployment was straightforward.

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

I did the setup by myself.

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

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

It has reduced our false positive rate by 90%.

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

We recently added on the new Link Lock license.

We also looked at Barracuda.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They're proactive but not overbearing.

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On our side, it was just me involved.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We were getting inundated with spam and having a hard time controlling it. Microsoft has tools, but it was getting overwhelming, so we installed SpamTitan. It seems to have taken care of the issue. Right now, I'm only using it for one Exchange server. 

SpamTitan has made it easier to manage spam. When other solutions I've used quarantined something, an admin had to manually find and release it. With SpamTitan, the end-user can monitor it themselves and release their own quarantined items. It's faster and less work. 

It's reduced the amount of time employees spend sorting through junk emails. I can't quantify it precisely, but it probably saves about half an hour a day per user. 

SpamTitan's individual spam reports for end-users is probably the best feature. It saves me time.

Some of the menus on the dashboard could be easier to navigate. It takes a little while to find things. 

I've been using SpamTitan for at least six months.

I haven't had any issues with SpamTitan so far. It seems to be working as advertised.

I only have about 30 users, but I don't imagine there would be a difference with 300 or more. 

I've only had to call TitanHQ for minor things, but they've been very responsive. Their support is much better than the customer service for other solutions I've used. I'd rate TitanHQ nine out of 10. 

Positive

I previously used N-Able's spam solution, but I switched because it didn't give the end-users control over their quarantine or spam. They couldn't review it or release it. Everything had to go through me, so if there was an issue, they'd have to contact me to resolve it. SpamTitan gives them a daily report.

Yeah. I have used a similar product. This one's far better. I mean, the last one I used the deployment was horrible, and it was just convoluted.

Deploying SpamTitan was straightforward. I don't need to do much. I only had to change the MX records, then make a couple changes in my send and receive connectors on my Exchange server. It took around 20 minutes to set everything up.

I had some support from TitanHQ.

My customers are happy, and I'm reselling it, so I make a little bit of money. It's low-effort because I seldom have to do anything with it. It's passive income for me. I charge my customer for the anti-spam services and pay SpamTitan, then charge my customer more than I'm paying.

I looked at other things, but I went ahead and signed up for SpamTitan as soon as I evaluated it.

I'd give it a 10 out of 10. I'd recommend it to anyone. There's no reason not to use it. It's easy and cheap.

Out of 1,000 emails sent to us, about 800 to 850 of them are blocked for one reason or another. The amount of spam, phishing, and junk that comes through email is just incredible.

The name of the game is identifying spam. The biggest area of concern for us is what it flags as spam but it's not really clear that it's spam. A definite benefit for us is being able to identify that in a customized way. We can make that header say whatever we want it to say. Right now, it says "Potential Spam," which jumps at our users. They say, "Oh, potential spam. I have to take a closer look at this." That has been a really big improvement for us. It's a simple feature, but it has really made a big difference in helping to identify possible spam for our users.

In addition, being on the admin side and seeing what is completely blocked and, I can definitely say it has saved a lot of time. The amount of email that our users don't get, email that is just solid junk, is staggering. I find it utterly amazing how much stuff doesn't need to come through and that is blocked. Not having to go through up to 80 junk emails out of 100 emails today equates directly to time savings. We have 35 users. SpamTitan probably saves each one of them 10 to 15 minutes per day, pretty easily. Multiply 10 to 15 minutes by 35 users, seven days a week, and there are significant time savings.

One of the most valuable features is that it's very straightforward. It's a really simple interface. With our previous products, you could spend a week, if not more, training on those products just to figure out the interface. With SpamTitan it took an hour or two or three, tops. Most of the time you find things on your own. SpamTitan's interface is designed to do just what you need to do and not a lot more.

We are using the geo-blocking because we don't do any work outside of the United States. We simply don't need to receive anything from .ru or .cn. I look at where the security risks are and, obviously, Russia, China, and Argentina are on that top-10 list for hacking attempts and spam. The ability to very definitively block those definitely helps out a lot.

We do have a select set of domains and websites that we do want to receive. We want to make sure that they get through. Some of them were initially blocked as spam so we added them to the filter and now they come through just fine. Others that we specifically do not want to receive from can be easily blocked, so that we don't have to worry about them as well. It's a very simple interface.

While I haven't looked specifically at how much the geo-blocking is blocking, I would estimate it is somewhere in the 40 to 50 percent range. It is almost like a "pre-block." It's that first level, eliminating emails we definitely don't want.

If the interface made it a bit easier to get to a training library that might be beneficial. Obviously, their techs have access to something like that. If they were to share that, I might be able to go to find the answer myself.

Also, the interface could be updated a little bit. I definitely wouldn't want it to be more complex, but I would like to see it a little bit more polished. And if I had to actually find a negative, it would be the speed. I wish that the interface were faster. We have very fast internet, but there is definitely some sluggishness between pages on the interface. Does that deter me? No. I just wish it were quicker.

We have been on TitanHQ SpamTitan for about a year and a half.

We haven't had any problems with its stability. There haven't been any outages. 

I have one issue that is still pending and it relates to how SpamTitan blocks things connected to voicemail inside of Microsoft Teams. The only reason I say it's still an issue is because it's at a high technical level and there are a lot of areas of it that are not my areas of expertise. I'm having to rely on high-level techs from SpamTitan and from Microsoft. We also have a consultant that we deal with on the Teams side. Trying to narrow that issue down is tough. But it's not an issue of stability. It's related more to settings.

Overall SpamTitan has been a very solid product so far.

When I need assistance, all I have to do is reach out. They are pretty responsive. In the past, we had to file a ticket or call in at a certain time. The plan we had would determine how long it would take to get a response.

With Mimecast, you had to have your customer number, and then call a certain number, and then launch your ticket. After that, they would have to verify which department it goes to. Somebody would try to call you and, of course, you had to be available. We haven't really had that experience on SpamTitan. I can quickly send an email and say, "Hey, I'm struggling with this," and they get back to me pretty quickly. Or I can dial in and just say, "Hey, I'm having a problem. Is there somebody available that might be able to walk me through, finding this particular answer that I need?"

If I had to compare SpamTitan with Mimecast, with SpamTitan I would be expecting an answer within an hour or two. If it was something that needed to be researched, if it was a little more complex, I would expect to hear from them within 24 hours. With Mimecast, I wasn't even getting a response for 24 to 48 hours, and that was just the initial reply. At times, those issues stretched out to take a week or longer to resolve.

Every company has room for improvement. With SpamTitan, I'd love to see a chat feature, even if it's not 24/7/365 and only available during core business hours. I recognize it's tough, with a product that can be used internationally, to know what those core hours look like. But if they had core hours in the US of 8:00 to 5:00 where you could chat with live tech support and say, "I'm really struggling with this. Can you help me out?" That would be good. If you could Get a quick answer without having to pick up the phone, so you could be working on other things at the same time, that would be awesome.

On the sales side, I'm a firm believer in a vendor doing checkups. I'd like to see that salesperson reach out every three months to simply say, "How are things going? Is there anything else we can do? Is there anything that's challenging you? Is there anything that you're looking for that we don't have?" Not only could they get some valuable feedback to help improve their product, and learn about different things that they might want to add in the future, but it would also keep their customers. If I were to say I'm struggling with something it would be great to have them say, "Let me help you get the answer you need," or "I've had some experience with that before. Here's what you need to do."

We are a SpamTitan Plus customer and we have been looking at two additional products out there. They might play into our 2023 budget. If the salesperson checks in, you never know where a sales lead is going to come from. And it would keep the customer happy too.

Positive

We were Mimecast customers in the past and let's just say we had what I would call a "ransom event" with them. They said we needed to pay them a large sum of money or they would not turn our email back on. We, of course, needed our email. At that point we decided that if that's the way they were going to do business, we were going to move away.

Once we made the investment in SpamTitan we were up and running literally in half an hour or an hour, and had fully moved away from Mimecast. The transition went very well.

There was very little to do in terms of the setup. I walked through it with them over the phone. We had a couple of MX records changes to make on our end to make sure that things would flow properly and, once those were done, we were able to see the results almost immediately. 

We have had to make a few changes to the system for things like sensitivity levels for spam. You can adjust it up and down as to how sensitive you want to be. At first, we were a little bit too sensitive, so we dialed it down a little bit.

We also made some changes to what our users would see, once spam was identified. For example, there is spam that is very definitively spam and we get rid of it. Then there's that "middle zone" where we're not really sure whether something is spam or not. It might fit some of the spam criteria, but it might be valid. And then there is the "definitely not spam," and we have it come through. We made some changes to that middle area so that our users could see that it is potential spam, and that they need to look at it to determine whether it is or not. The only complaint they had was the identifier on the header. If they choose to respond, the header stays and they have to remove that manually. But beyond that, it has really done a good job for us.

We did a very quick search of what products were out there. SpamTitan has a unique name to it, but it rose to the top of the search engines that we were looking at. My CEO and I decided to give it a shot.

At the time, we needed to find a solution on short notice. Because of SpamTitan's rating and the fact that its price point was affordable to us, it seemed to fit the niche for us. 

There were some alternatives out there but they were very time-consuming. We needed something and we needed it "right now." SpamTitan was able to come into the picture and be up and running in a very short period of time. With the previous products we had, there were so many pages to go through and so many settings and so many options for customization. It was very confusing and very time-consuming. With SpamTitan, the settings are very easy and intuitive.

The fact that SpamTitan is very simple can be both good and bad. It's good in terms of setting it up, monitoring it, and making the changes that you need to make. Doing those things is very straightforward. The bad side is that sometimes you want a more granular level, but the more granular it gets, obviously, the more time-consuming and the more specialized it gets.

For example, if there is a specific company where some of their emails are good and some of their emails are bad, that might be a little bit tougher to implement with SpamTitan. We might have to identify the ones to block by specific email addresses, as opposed to specifying the domain with certain criteria.

That said, blocking at that level gets really intricate, in general. It might take me two or three calls with a technician on the Mimecast side to write that specific rule, whereas, on the SpamTitan side, it's a little bit more straightforward. We don't get to that level very often, as those situations are few and far between. SpamTitan is easy. It doesn't take long to go in and find what you want and that's what we like about it. You can identify what you need to change and put it in place in minutes as opposed to hours or days.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

It's a no-brainer for me. It has 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been using this solution for almost a year.

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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