TitanHQ SpamTitan Reviews

We use it for filtering emails, inbound and outbound, as well as have it act as a smart host for our external clients. Being an MSP, we primarily use it for filtering emails on behalf of the clients as well as filtering the content that they send and receive using the SpamTitan platform.

It is our primary filtering system. We use it to filter emails on behalf of organizations who have their own email system platforms, like Office 365. In terms of extensiveness, we use it 100%. 

We have big organizations within our country who use the SpamTitan service as their primary security system for their intelligent communication with their clients, within the country and outside the country.

It provides security for the communication between the sender and receiver. It does the encryption perfectly. We ensure that emails are sent without any security breaches. The spam catch rate at the moment is almost 100%.

The solution has helped reduce spam rates overall by 75%. It has helped us to reduce the number of attacks that we used to have. It has helped to reduce the number of complaints we've been getting from customers in terms of them receiving a lot of spam and unsolicited emails coming from the outside.

• The quarantine feature
• The reporting feature
• The content filtering feature

With the reporting feature, we were able to have broader insight on emails that our clients send as well as the emails that get to our clients. We are able to analyze when we get complaints from clients as to what happened to the emails that they sent to their clients, who sent it at what time, and the content in cases of complaints where the client did not get an email from the sender or their emails were not delivered to their sender. We are able to view at what point did the email drop, who sent the email, and to whom.

We use the geo-blocking feature based on IP addresses. We also use it based on the country and the top-level domain. We are able to block any of those three. For example, we get a lot of emails from Japan. Therefore, we have blocked the top-level domain .jp at the end.

The interface is not so user-friendly at the moment. We did attend training a few months ago on their new interface. They have a new GUI that is quite user-friendly and easy to navigate.

We would like to improve the number of quarantine reports received per day. At the moment, only one is received within 24 hours. So, there are a number of complaints that we get from customers who want to improve the reporting of the quarantined emails since they only get one copy per day. This means they may not receive other emails that have been received after they get the report. So, we would like SpamTitan to improve on the frequency of the quarantine report.

I have been using it for three years.

Stability is at 99%. We rarely have outages. We rarely contact their support team because their service is running smoothly at the moment.

The solution is scalable. If you contact them for an upgrade or add-ons on your current SpamTitan product, they are very much available to help. The service change is almost instant. Within 24 hours, you are able to upgrade from one package to another, and add-ons are done instantly.

In terms of upgrades, we are considering upgrading from our current license, which accommodates 2,000 emails. We want to upgrade to 4,000 emails. They have been very helpful on how we can implement the upgrade.

Their support is very helpful. We get the feedback that we want on time. There is a feature of their ticketing system that is perfect and easy to track the conversation as well as the history. You can download the chats that you have had with them for future reference.

I have interacted with other vendors or suppliers of almost the same feature. I can say that SpamTitan's support expertise is very good because they know what we go through and help. They have solutions at hand. If you ask them, they can help and direct you to the solution that you need. 

Positive

SpamTitan’s geo-blocking feature helps allow us to block spam emails entering our network and servers, reducing our spam intake. Our former solution was only able to handle outbound traffic. That meant that we did not have control over what was coming through our network. For example, we used to get spam emails with unknown usernames, so our customers were getting a lot more spam emails than the important emails that they should expect. 

At the time that we acquired the product, we had another product called Proxmox. As we were implementing, we tested it for about four days. After that time, we did not have any issues in terms of complaints from clients because it was smooth. While the other product was running, we brought in SpamTitan. As a strategy, from my end, it was perfectly done.

The previous solution was not user-friendly. It would only filter one way or direction. This meant we needed to buy from them twice, i.e., the same product, for inbound and outbound. Since our budget was constrained, we looked at SpamTitan, and its pricing was perfect. It was easy to deploy and user-friendly.

With the deployment of SpamTitan, we are now able to catch those unnecessary emails coming into our network, which we are able to block. There is a feature, which we have enabled, to verify the usernames that we host, meaning those that we don't host are blocked before they reach our customers or our network.

Before Proxmox and SpamTitan, we were using Barracuda Central. but acquiring the hardware as well as the renewal of Energize per year, that meant going beyond our budget. So, we approached SpamTitan. We noticed that the hardware was cost effective. We could subscribe per quarter, biannually, or annually. That flexibility meant that we had to quickly jump to SpamTitan for those advantages.

It was easy because we did the hosting for the configurations on our end with their help. It was done within a day. It took about five hours to complete the configurations, then have emails in and out through the SpamTitan product.

Within the first three years, we were able to see that this product has been perfect for our business. We have acquired more clients using this platform, unlike with our previous platform.

The collaboration between TitanHQ and us is 95% in terms of positioning us to acquire new business. Titan products manage both inbound and outbound at the lowest cost. All the requirements that we need for this solution are covered. Also, the support is perfect. We don't have any problems with it.

In the last three years, we have acquired or managed to grow the customer base on email services because we get a lot of referrals. Because we have the geo-blocking feature, which quarantines emails, it sends a report to our clients before they accept the email. This means they get to know about SpamTitan. A number of them call us about the solution before we reach out to them and sell the service.

They have different packages, services, or products that they sell. I would recommend it for small businesses to larger organizations, even enterprises, but not individuals. 

There is the flexibility to ask them what you want, then they will advise a package that suits your business.

SpamTitan's key differentiators are the pricing, system, and service that we get. They are very different from other systems that we have used or partnered with from Titan.

Before jumping into using the product, I would advise that you research other products as SpamTitan's features are mostly required for businesses at the moment.

I would rate the solution as 10 out of 10.

It takes the load off of our server. It also takes the load off of our Internet connection, since we are not bringing in a whole bunch of spam emails unnecessarily that need to be filtered out. 

We partnered with TitanHQ SpamTitan platform so all incoming emails go through their servers first before they reach our network. It takes out, on average, 75% to 80% of the emails that would normally be received as junk. Those are filtered out and we keep what is important to us.

Over the years that we've been using it, people have gotten the confidence that the messages that they get are legitimate. Also, they glance at the stuff that ends up in their quarantine, but they don't necessarily worry about it. So, it has overall increased employee comfort and productivity.

For some of our power users, I would regularly have them sending us help desk tickets that said, "This is spam. This is spam. This is spam." That has probably been cut down by 50% 60% for those specific power users. For those who heavily rely on email, there has been probably a 50% to 60% time savings.

SpamTitan has helped improve our spam catch rate and reduce our false positive rate.

The ability for users to manage their own allow and block lists is its most valuable feature. Daily, at 3:00 AM, we have configured it so users will get a quarantine email that shows all their messages that were blocked from the day before. They can go in and release the messages themselves or they can block them if they don't ever want to see them again. They can allow them permanently, if it is a valid email that they should be receiving on a regular basis. Therefore, it really gives the end users the power to do their own thing and reduces the number of help desk tickets that my team needs to respond to.

We just implemented SpamTitan’s geo-blocking feature in the last couple of months. It has been great. We have only seen one false positive and that was a company that we partnered with in California. Their messages got blocked because their server was in Germany. Germany was one of the countries we happen to block with geo-blocking. They were like, "Oh, that is really bizarre because all of our stuff is here in California." Turns out that their hosted email that they were using was going through a failover test or something like that. So, they were rerouting their servers through Germany at that particular time. It definitely did what it was supposed to do.

We used the geo-blocking feature to restrict emails from specific destinations with a Google search. We went through some of the security forums and platforms out there and looked at the top 10 countries that cybersecurity professionals recommend blocking. We then added those to our geo-blocking list.

Primarily, we are a California-based company and don't really do business with companies outside of the United States. So, the geo-blocking feature is just an extra layer of security and extra piece of mind. Therefore, if any spam out there is trying to purport that it is coming from the United States, but really isn't, then we would not let those messages through.

Since we turned on the geo-blocking feature, we have definitely seen a reduction in spam. I don't sift through the thousands of messages a day that I see in the dashboard to see which ones were blocked by geoblocking. I am sure there are filters and things like that, but I don't necessarily get the time to deep dive into it like that. 

The user interface is really straightforward. I haven't had any issues with it whatsoever.

The overall intuitiveness is really good. We have been able to run reports, set up quarantine emails, and integrate with our Exchange server. That has all been extremely straightforward. 

The only improvement that comes to mind is updates. We are technically on TitanHQ's private cloud. We are responsible for updating our platform when a new version comes out. I would personally prefer to have SpamTitan just notify me, and say, "At this specific time on this specific day, we will be upgrading you to the newest platform."

I have been using it since October 2020.

The stability has been rock-solid. 

SpamTitan has vastly superior stability versus the previous email security solutions that we have used. Not only were we getting a lot of false positives that was really frustrating, but there was a particular day when SolarWinds was having some sort of network issue. Mail was delayed by six to eight hours coming through the network. There is just no way, as an organization, we can function like that. So, we had to get off that platform.

The scalability has been fantastic. We grow on average four to five percent year-on-year. In the two and a half years that we have been using it, we have not needed to worry about its performance.

It is being used extensively. There are several clinics that we manage who are also being filtered as well as us. I know of at least one other clinic that will be coming onboard shortly, and we will roll them into SpamTitan as well. I don't see us having any issues with having additional growth.

Whenever I have had questions and needed to reach out to support, there has always been a very quick turnaround. They have access to our dashboard so they can see what we are looking at and help guide us through where we need to go and what we need to do.

The technical support has been fantastic. Whenever we have had issues, I typically just open a support ticket. They are very responsive. Typically, within four hours, I will have an answer to my question. I would give them a solid nine out of 10. There is always room for improvement.

For our previous solution from SolarWinds, I would probably have given them about four or five out of 10. This is compared to the support that I get with TitanHQ, which is much better.

I know that they are changing their method. Instead of just by email, we now go in through an actual web portal to create a ticket. 

Positive

We have used a couple of different spam filtering systems in the past. We have an on-premise Exchange server, therefore all of our email is housed within our network. We wanted to find a robust solution that would filter spam before it reached our network.

Previously, we were using Mail Assure by SolarWinds. Prior to that, we were using a solution called Online Spam Solutions, which was just a small locally run company. The performance on Online Spam Solutions was not as good as it used to be. We were losing mail and getting a lot more false positives than we should have. Then, we did some research. We were already using SolarWinds for another product, so we decided to give them a try. Their sales pitch was vastly superior to what the actual product was. We were only with them for about two years, then we found SpamTitan and have been really happy ever since.

It was pretty straightforward. I had a little bit of an issue with the LDAP configuration, which was an issue on WebTitan as well. It was more important for us to have it working for SpamTitan. Working with support, the issue was pretty straightforward and we got it ironed out in a matter of days. From initially creating the platform to where we had it fully configured, it took about two weeks.

Email is so mission-critical. We did not want to have any downtime or a period where we were really going through a lot of fine-tuning. One of the nice things about SpamTitan was the default settings that came with the platform were very good. It was already doing a better job than what we came from. So, the fine tuning period was a lot shorter than I anticipated it was going to be based on previous solutions.

We had TitanHQ help us with anything that we needed.

It is very good. We actually ended up saving money from our previous solution.

We did evaluate some other companies. I participate in an organization called Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society (HIMSS). I reached out to some of my peers there and asked them what they were using. Quite a few of them came back and said that they were using SpamTitan from TitanHQ. So, we gave them a full evaluation and decided to use them.

Definitely go for it. It will make your end users feel a lot happier because they can manage their own quarantines, allow lists, and block lists. At the same time, knowing that you have your own private cloud that you can manage yourself makes it a great solution for those who want to have full administrative access to their own system.

I would give the solution a solid nine out of 10. I would almost give it a 10. Frankly, it has been an extremely good solution for us as an organization. However, I am not normally one to give a score of 10. There is always some sort of room for improvement, but this solution is a high nine in my opinion.

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.

Positive

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 is an effective email filter, however, it's increased over time since they have new features that expand the offering. We use it for more security-based uses. 

We are able to report on various different odds and ends as we see some increase in spam. We do so using the base and logic that's built into it and it is helpful. It allows us to use some deep learning features to proactively block spam. It's really been one of the most effective spam filters that I've worked with for an on-premises solution.

The Link Lock feature with SpamTitan Plus has been great. We're all pretty familiar with the technology. That said, as we work throughout our day, we're moving fast and people won't always spend the time to diagnose potential danger before they click. This is why that feature alone saved us tremendously.

There are a couple of incidents where we had to do triage when somebody clicked on a link. The Link Lock feature prevents anything bad from happening. It stops it right at the gate. It gets people to actively think and also helps us train our staff. We get reports of, "oh, you know this, why am I seeing this prompt?" It naturally puts that little bit of a mental block in between the process, and that alone is tremendous. It's overwhelmingly beneficial just as a general-purpose mail filter. We saw benefits from it immediately.

We typically won't roll out a new product to all users. We did some initial testing, rolled it out to some of the staff, and eventually rolled it out to all the staff. It's still highly beneficial.

SpamTitan Plus is another feature that we use, but it's primarily an email filter or email security facilitating appliance.

The features that we're finding to be most valuable are mostly those that leverage the quarantine and some of the reporting functions. We like all the blacklist details and the day-to-day reports that it generates for spam and users. All of that is highly tunable, which is much appreciated.

The new SpamTitan Plus with the Link Lock feature is great. We implemented it and use it as well.

We use SpamTitan's geo-blocking feature. It allows us to block spam emails that enter our network and servers and reduces our spam intake. Some of those features are also fantastic as they enable us to report on, for example, who's the most active spam relays. We can see all IPs when going into the console. We've integrated a process where we review SpamTitan and then add those kinds of details in order to block both efforts. If a user has any issues, I can use the reporting feature and see what is being blocked through geo-blocking or what is being blocked by our firewall appliance.

It saves us time. All of our changes are really pretty quick. As far as time-saving goes, if I compare it to a previous solution like Postini, which is an old Google product that was very similar, SpamTitan is easier to navigate. When I started to use SpamTitan, I discovered that it was actually much easier to administer than Postini, which helped save admin time.

In terms of geo-blocking, most of the reporting functionality is baked into SpamTitan, it relays all those details and shows us what IPs are relaying spam. We go through a process where we start wide, and we don't open up a lot due to the geo IP blocking. It can be really dangerous if we don't use that sparingly. By looking at the reports that SpamTitan generates, we can go and add those details to the geo-blocking feature and make some decisions based on that. This is mission-critical. It's the first line of defense. Email is something that every organization leaves exposed to the internet and it's constantly being attacked. Email is where the number one cause of phishing scams originate which is why it's 110% mission-critical.

SpamTitan helped save employees time by not having them sort through junk and spam emails. Being able to create that and have it generate the quarantine reports, keeps everything consolidated. I can dial it in to what I like. If I want to go extreme or want to go light, it gives me those options.

Quite a bit of time was previously spent sorting through unwanted junk. That was one of the biggest complaints. When I started to dig into it, I was pretty amazed at how quickly I was able to rectify just going through the console. It has options too for being able to go and administer user accounts, so as an admin, I can go through and make decisions and choices before the user even sees it. Typically, we require that people check their quarantine at least once or twice a day. As an admin, I may go through and see what is happening before the end-user notices it. With one person we can tackle that task versus everyone in the company having to do it individually, which compounds exponentially.

The spam catch rate and false positives before versus after implementation were night and day. When I first started it, they hadn't done a lot of the tuning. Then, once I started to ratchet down the tuning it changed overnight. At that point, I was getting compliments from the staff.

They really just need to continue to roll out new features. They constantly develop this product. We get updates at least once a quarter and sometimes multiple times per quarter. We investigate new trends for spam relays or malware, and the SpamTitan team constantly adds new features to it to address what we find. They constantly improve what they've got, which we appreciate and we hope they continue to do.

They can increase some of the reporting around user logins. In order for us to make that determination, we have to pull down reports. They could make it a bit easier.

The finesse of the reporting could probably be improved. Being able to filter and generate reports and being able to ship those reports to different users would be ideal. It's got some of those features built-in, however, increasing some of that could be beneficial. For the work that we do and with the way we administer it, oftentimes we have to pull down logs and rig through the logs to find out what happened. Maybe some additional reporting as to why it flagged spam would be useful and the reasoning behind why it actually flagged email X. Or, if we get a false positive, then explain why. Right now, we do a manual process where we go through the logs. If they increase the level of reporting, we’d pretty much have a perfect product.

I've been using this solution for about six to seven years. It was implemented before I started with the company.

The stability is great. I've never had a problem with it.

I had problems with Postini on a couple of different occasions, however, it was also an off-premises solution too. I also had my WAN that's involved in that connection and Google's far-end servers. With this solution running on-premises, I forget what they run an OS on it. However, it's a Unix-like operating system that runs well, it will process updates, and we've never had an issue with an update. It just keeps going.

In terms of scalability, I've never really investigated it as we really didn't have much of a need to. I do know that it's got high availability features and it's pretty easy to set up. It's also got an API call that you can implement with it too. If you wanted to manage it with some other kind of NMS or something like that, you can, as it has those capabilities. We don't particularly have a need for it. There's less of an attack vector.

SpamTitan's support is amazing. They answer any questions you have 24/7. The way they can connect remotely to help diagnose problems is great. I've never had a bad experience with their support team.

I can't think of another vendor that I work with that has better support than SpamTitan. They either give me a solution, give a workaround, or explain what's going on nearly immediately.

Positive

The last solution I used was Postini before Google retired it. That was almost a decade ago. I don't think Postini is still around anymore.

I didn't necessarily make the switch, it was already in production. I'm not really interested in another product. Purely from a support standpoint alone, in a world where customer support is all but dead, SpamTitan consistently delivers.

I was not involved in the initial setup, however, when they deployed it, it was very light. They didn't take advantage of a lot of the features and it's got a very deep feature set too.

Some of my support engagements are purely just asking questions, however, they never give me a whole look at the manual or pawn me off. They answer the question almost immediately.

In terms of the environment we have, it pretty much sits at the gate for all of our inbound emails and it's used for the entire company. If you categorize this into a smaller to medium business category, it handles less than 50 users. 

Other than standard updates, this solution doesn't require any maintenance. We have five or so people who can handle the maintenance aspect. They are there mostly to maintain the quarantine, watch, regulate the product, and continue to tune it over time.

The ROI from a SpamTitan license is pretty good.

It pays for itself. If it mitigated one event then it's paid for itself. These days, if ransomware gets into your network and takes over, you can have a really, really hard time. The cost per the ROI on it is tremendous for sure.

The solution is very affordable. 

I didn't look into other options. I really didn't feel like there was a need to.

We have it on a single server on-premises. It's the latest release. 

We do not use ArcTitan or EncryptTitan. We have other solutions that we work with for those use cases. I would use them if we didn't already have that kind of other processes that we look at. We just don't have a business need for it.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten. I recommend it to anyone that's looking for a solution like this. I'd advise potential users to just buy it and figure it out and they'll be there to help you. Their support is excellent. I cannot say enough good things about them. 

SpamTitan is our primary defense for email against spam and viruses.

We have it running on a virtual machine image that they gave us. It is hosted in our data center.

We have noticed a trend of approximately 5% growth in spam per year, versus legitimate email, and SpamTitan seems to catch almost all of it.

Using SpamTitan saves us a ton of time. We have users that get literally thousands of junk emails a day. The longer you are at an organization, the more spam you seem to accumulate, and it seems mostly the owner specifically. In our scenario, they went from getting like two or three thousand junk emails a day, to now just two reports a day. They don't have to go through each email to filter what's actual work and what's just junk.

We had some users that were spending two or three hours going through email. There is a huge difference for some people, although it depends on the user. Some people do not use email often so it's not really beneficial for them. For the people that spend a lot of time sending and receiving email, it's saved quite a bit of time. It is upwards of hours in a day. Also, it saves me a ton of time because it prevents them from clicking the wrong thing.

Twice a day, it sends a report of what it has caught. I haven't actually looked at the report in perhaps two years because the accuracy for my inbox was always dead on. At the same time, however, we have a lot of users that check the report all the time. One reason is that they may have a new client that is accidentally classified as spam, or they receive a legitimate email that contains a lot of spam keywords. One of our clients is a large equipment manufacturer and they send legitimate emails with marketing taglines that sometimes get flagged as spam. For the most part, we have very few false positives.

SpamTitan is good at catching zero-day viruses and spam messages.

One feature that helped us a lot in the past year is the Link Lock. It will check the URLs that are included in messages and if they're not trusted sites then the link will be blocked.  For example, our users will receive an email that says something to the effect of "Your password is about to expire, so please click on the enclosed link." If they click on the link, it causes a huge headache for us. Now, it's automatically blocked, which saves us a ton of time.

The Link Lock feature will check every URL in your email against a database of legitimate URLs. A malicious URL might go to a phishing site or a hacker site but if it isn't in the list of valid URLs, it will respond with a message that says "Blocked by SpamTitan Link Lock". It re-writes the URL so that it goes through their server, rather than the URL itself.

We just recently turned on the geo-blocking feature to block emails from Russia and Ukraine. We don't monitor the email that is blocked, unless it comes under the "relay denied" classification. That is approximately 2% of our total intake.

We use the whitelist feature to allow exemptions based on trusted senders. This is an important feature because we have approximately 12 sub-companies, and there is a good deal of marketing material sent between people. We configure them as trusted senders so that the messages don't get classified as spam, due to a large amount of marketing material. The whitelist allows them to communicate with each other and not get filtered out.

The user interface is great. Everything is in the browser; it is easy to set up and there are not a lot of tabs.

Most of it is simple to use and the side that the user sees is pretty intuitive. That said, there are grades of difficulty based on user experience.

When an email is quarantined, there are a couple of different search filters to help find what you're looking for. Having more choices would be helpful because as it is now, we can search for inbound or outbound, the score, the subject, and the email address. I would like to see a filter for searching inside the message content when it is quarantined.

I have been using TitanHQ SpamTitan for approximately seven years.

This is a stable product. Our current uptime is 412 days. It was offline at the time because we had an outage in our data center. We had something plugged in wrong, so the fault was on our side.

Our service from them has been steady, including our daily antivirus updates. We've not had any problems. Stability is very important to us because if this goes down then we don't get any email.

We are not really seeing a heavy load on the machine that we host it on, so I assume it could go much higher. Now, we have a 500-user license, but we seem to be going over it every day. For example, at the moment, it's showing 755, so we're probably going to increase to a 1,000-user license when it comes up for renewal in another month.

With a current load of approximately 6%, I'm sure that it can easily go to 10,000 users on our hardware.

Everyone in the company uses it, although I and the CTO are the only two administrators. Our CTO takes care of the management, whereas I am the network/security administrator. I normally perform the maintenance, although the CTO does it sometimes.

If I need support, I can immediately send a ticket and click connect on the website. They'll be able to go in and do whatever they need to fix an issue.

Initially, we were hesitant to join because they are based out of Ireland and we were concerned about being able to get support. However, it's never been an issue. I'm the main contact for support, and I might call them once a year for a weird issue. Usually, they get back to me within 30 minutes.

I would definitely rate their support a ten out of ten.

Positive

Before SpamTitan, we used to use MailGate, from Tumbleweed. The biggest difference between these two products was the price. The functionality was very close to the same but SpamTitan is approximately 30% of the price. Similarly, both are pretty stable and I wouldn't say that one was more stable than the other.

We switched because everything seemed to be as good as it was with solutions from the other big providers, with a huge difference in cost.

It took us approximately an hour to set it up, and most of that time was on Office 365 to route incoming mail through SpamTitan first.

Ease of setup is something that was more important to me than it was to management. They would have preferred to use a free, open-source product. The problem with the open-source products is that anytime we needed to make a configuration change, it would take three or four days of research to figure out how to do it.

This is in contrast to SpamTitan, where there are only eight or nine tabs, with eight or nine subtabs on each one. For the most part, setting it requires visiting perhaps six tabs. If you have a question about any of the features, there is a question mark icon on the browser explaining each one. It's pretty well organized from the administration side.

We implemented it ourselves.

We have realized ROI from our time savings. It has saved me hundreds of hours because we have people in one department that would constantly click on links that were bad. Most people would know not to click on them but certain people would always click on malicious links. Once that happened, they had a virus and it was sending out viruses to everyone in their email contacts.

Every time that happened, it cost me between 50 and 60 hours of time to fix the problem. It was an absolute nightmare that used to happen once or twice per month, and now the incidence of that has gone down to almost nothing. 

We implemented SpamTitan over other solutions because of its price. The functionality of all of these services is pretty much even, with the main differences between them being support options and where you can deploy them.

For other vendors, we had to purchase their hardware or employ a cloud solution that adds thousands of dollars per year to the cost. SpamTitan is something that you can put on your own hardware and it runs great.

The only additional cost was for Link. It isn't expensive, at perhaps a dollar extra per user.

Management was interested in saving costs by using an open-source solution. However, they are more difficult and time-consuming to configure.

We also looked at Barracuda and we didn't find much difference between the two, except for cost. We chose SpamTitan because it is more cost-effective.

We have not had any issues with the product, the pricing is probably better than most vendors, and the support is definitely top-notch.

My advice for others is that if you're looking for a simple solution that you can deploy quickly, especially if you're on a budget, then I definitely recommend SpamTitan. You can have a full solution within a day.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

Our primary use case is filtering incoming emails.

SpamTitan is a product that saves us time. The less spam that you have, the more time you have because you're not digging through the mail that hits your inbox. The other thing is that it blocks potential trojans, viruses, and phishing attempts. This means that IT has less to deal with in case something does get through and opened, resulting in an infection.

On the front end, the user community doesn't have nearly as much email to deal with, in particular, spam messages. On the back end for IT, it's a huge time saver because we're not infecting our network with malware.

Before we got SpamTitan, the amount of time spent dealing with unwanted emails depended on the user. People that were dealing with a lot of outside entities would receive more spam because their email address is out there. Depending on the user, they might have three or four spam messages, or somebody might have between 20 and 30 to deal with.

For people on the higher end, with 20 or 30 spam messages that are hitting their inbox, it's time-consuming to go through and determine whether something is valid or invalid. In some cases, an email says it's coming from within the company, perhaps somebody in our purchasing department. When another employee sees the name, they assume it's safe but in reality, it's a spoofed email address. People often don't feel like digging into it so they just look at the email, resulting in the introduction of a trojan, virus, or other malware.

The amount of time that it takes to deal with spam messages varies. It depends on the type of spam that is hitting the inbox. In the morning when you fire up your email program, a high-end user may spend 15 to 20 minutes going through stuff just to make sure it's valid or not valid.

Then, throughout the day, these people were getting spam messages. It eats your time, even with one or two here and there, because you're taking time to maybe open the message, then investigate if it's really coming from a valid address or not. Even if it only takes a minute to do one message, and you get 15 of those a day, that's 15 minutes of your time. That's quite valuable.

We have thousands of users so even if 2,000 of them get five spam messages a day, and it takes each one a minute to deal with, it's a lot of time.

Using SpamTitan has immensely improved our spam catch rate and reduced our false positive rate. In a five-year timeframe, it has blocked between 60 million and 70 million messages. 

The most valuable feature is the protection that it offers against spam, phishing, viruses, and other such attacks. That's the biggest benefit of the product.

We use the geo-blocking feature, which helps to reduce our spam intake. There are known locations that are notorious for sending spam, viruses, and so forth, which is one of the reasons we use it. Right now, our filter is blocking approximately 75% of the mail that hits our door. Only 26% of the mail we get actually passes.

We use the geo-blocking feature for restricting emails based on country, and it works well. However, if something does pass that is spam or a phishing attempt, then we may block by IP address if necessary. This is very important to our organization because spam email is bad, and it's a problem for us.

We are able to create exceptions based on a trusted sender's specific location or IP address, and it works fine for that. We don't have a large rule base and in most cases, the senders, who are typically customers or vendors that we deal with, do not have their email exchange set up properly. They don't have the proper checks in place, so we add exceptions for them.

The user interface is good, and it's pretty easy to use once you learn your way around. That said, there's a lot to it and it's in-depth. There are many aspects to the interface, and there are a lot of tabs.

Overall, in terms of the system's intuitiveness, it's okay. When you click on a tab for system settings, as an example, there are multiple tabs that you can drill down into from there. Sometimes, it can be a little bit difficult to find out where you want to go, just because there are many layers to the interface.

It is difficult to say how I might improve it. There are many pieces to it, and a lot of layers, but the way they have it set up is fine. Sometimes, however, you have to search around a little bit to find out where you want to go.

There are eight main tabs and once you click on one of those tabs, it takes you into another area where there can be up to eight or ten other things that you can click into. Then, when you get in there, it might be another six or eight areas that you can look at.

If you go into system setup, as an example, and then go to static routing for network configuration, that's three layers deep. You would probably figure that the network configuration is going to be in the system setup, so you would start there intuitively, but it's a lot of options.

One of the areas that can be improved is the GUI. The product works well but finding things in the interface can sometimes be a bit difficult, just because it's so in-depth and covers a lot.

We have been using TitanHQ SpamTitan for approximately five years.

This is a very stable product. We have not had any downtime and we have not had the product crash on us, where it was not filtering mail.

We have not rebooted our server for five years.

SpamTitan is easily scalable. If you give them more money, they'll give you more licenses.

We are a large company with many factories in Mexico, China, Vietnam, and several US cities. We have several thousand employees and in the past five years of using SpamTitan, we have blocked between 60 million and 70 million messages.

We have 100% adoption. Any email coming into our company has to go through this filter before it hits our Exchange server and then is distributed to the user community. 

The technical support is really good. I've had great luck with the support group out of Titan HQ. They are quick to respond and typically have a solution very quickly. If they don't, they'll dig into it and keep updating you as to where they're at in the process of finding a solution. Overall, I'm pleased with the support.

I would rate their support a nine out of ten. It's not a perfect rating because there is always that time when you don't get the exact answer you want, or they can't do exactly what you want. In any case, that could be a software update or something that has to be reprogrammed. They will send that up to development, but sometimes it takes time for that to happen.

If comparing support to other vendors, their response time is very quick. When you open a ticket, you get a response right away that they acknowledge that you've submitted a help desk ticket with them. Then typically you'll get a response from the tech at Titan HQ that has picked up the ticket.

They'll let you know either right then about a solution, or that they're investigating. Typically you will hear back, I would say normally within the hour, with a solution, or potential questions to help with a solution.

I would rate them above average as far as their response time and working through issues.

Positive

Prior to using SpamTitan, we were using the filtering that is part of our Microsoft Exchange.

It's quite easy to set up. There are a lot of defaults that are set up in how it functions and what it does. Then, as you start using the product more, you can get more in-depth and put more controls and filters in place. As far as initially setting it up, the process is pretty easy.

Having it easy to set up is always an important thing. The less time you have to spend configuring and setting up a product, the more time you have for doing other things.

From start to finish, we spent approximately one day getting it set up. The server was installed, the software was installed, and then we set up getting our mail routed through it.

After the initial setup, there is some programming and other things that you do over time. But, I wouldn't consider that as part of the installation process.

We did the implementation ourselves, with the help of Titan HQ. Our experience with them has been good. The products that they sell are typically good and easy to use, so you'll potentially put them into other locations or buy more licenses.

The deployment can be done with one person, and we have a couple of people on staff that take care of it. If there are issues with false positives or things of that nature, we've got a couple of people on staff that oversee it. That's not their only job; they're network administrators or systems admins and they have multiple tasks. That said, they have a couple of people that are familiar with the product and work on it.

Pricing is on par with other products, and it's reasonable. They have different categories as far as the size of your company and how they license it, which is good.

We evaluated three or four products at the time, although it was several years ago and I don't recall exactly which ones.

We preferred SpamTitan after looking at other customer reviews, talking with some references, and they just came out the winner as far as capabilities. Support is a big thing for anybody when it comes to dealing with a product, and it's important because you're potentially blocking viruses and other malware that could harm the company very badly.

My advice for anybody who is looking into implementing this product is to first go through their demo with them and make sure you understand how in-depth the product is because there's a lot to it. If the end-user wants a product that they plug in and turn on and they never have to look at it again, SpamTitan is not it.

This is an in-depth product and there are multiple ways to block things, although it is fairly plug-and-play with their default configuration. Other than just the actual configuration of IP addresses and things of that nature, there's a lot to it.

I know there are simpler options out there, but they also are not as comprehensive as what you can do with the product.

Overall, as far as the product goes and how it catches things, I'm quite happy with it. Ninety percent of the time, it does a great job. There is that 10% that sometimes you may want to try and do something with it, and it doesn't have the capability. That is pretty rare and when it happens, typically they will send that to development, and development will come up with a solution.

It may take a little time for them because I'm sure they have a huge backlog of things, but it's not like they tell you it's something they're not going to do. Instead, they'll send it to the development team and explain that there is an issue that the customer wants to be corrected or a capability that they want to have added. At that point, it will go up the chain within their organization.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

I work for a city government, and SpamTitan provides front-end protection for any incoming email. It scans for viruses or any malware that comes across the email. I also block some countries using geoblocking features in the software. 

For example, since we don't do business with China, we block any emails coming from there because most of them try to do something malicious. 

SpamTitan has led to a tremendous reduction in spam intake. Employees will enter their email when registering for a website, which gets sold off to a million places. 

Since we implemented the solution in 2018, about 74 percent of our messages have come in clean, so 26 percent were spam or other rejected emails. That equals about 2 million clean messages and 600,000 emails that were geoblocked, flagged as spam, or otherwise rejected because of viruses or bad attachments.

SpamTitan has also improved our catch rate and reduced false positives relative to our previous solution. It's hard to say how much because I wasn't in that area of operations at the time, so I wasn't involved with our previous spam solution. 

I'm not sure if it was a configuration issue, but the catch rate was probably the opposite. In other words, three-quarters of the mail coming through was spam and only a quarter was clean. 

Implementing SpamTitan made our operations a lot more efficient because the users have accounts and can check for spam. If it's a false positive, they can release it and get the email. With the old system, they had to go to two different spam portals. It was convoluted, and I don't think too many people have used it.

It's hard for me to quantify the amount of time our employees save. I don't have those statistics. However, it saves time if your inbox isn't filled with spam. You don't need to waste time filtering through the junk. The city's communications through email have become a great deal more efficient, but I don't have statistics to back that up.

Our security has improved, as well. A virus hit the entire city government, and we believe the infection came through email. We reevaluated our products after that. We changed our antivirus and firewalls and switched our spam solution to SpamTitan. We changed almost every security product that we had to something better.

TitanSpam's security features keep malicious occurrences from coming, and the spam features prevent all the garbage from coming into our inboxes. And the geoblocking helps us automatically block email from regions we don't do business with.

The user interface is also highly user-friendly. I didn't know much about this system when we got it in 2018, but I could easily navigate it. It's intuitive and straightforward with tabs, so you can access the settings you need to get to. 

They also let you customize it to match your organization's feel, so it looks like a product from your organization. I like when companies do that. Our city logo is on it when you log in to this system. 

After we configured SpamTitan to our liking, it pretty much took care of itself. It even provides spam scores on all the emails that come in. You can determine the highest score you want to allow. 

SpamTitan's logging features could be improved. The logs are hard to deal with because you need to download the log as a text file. Then you need to search through this text file to find what you need. 

At the same time, I don't have too many problems, so I don't have to look in the logs that often. It doesn't bother me that much, but it would help if I could view these logs in a more user-friendly way.

We've been using SpamTitan since 2018.

SpamTitan is extremely stable. I've never had this system go down.

I would say that SpamTitan is highly scalable. I can see memory and CPU usage on the dashboard, and we have more than enough hardware to scale out as high as we need. I know they have packages with a lot more users than we deal with. We're running on about 500 users, but I don't think we would have a problem scaling from there. We don't have too much use for more. We only have about 900 employees here.

Many city employees don't use their official email accounts that much. For example, we have public works people out on the streets who hardly use email. My license usage went over the limit a few times, but it's not much. I think it's only 50 or 60 users.

I rate TitanHQ's support eight out of 10. They're highly knowledgeable about the product they have produced and resolve issues fairly quickly. I've had one or two issues in four years that required them to do something on their end. 

They have remote support, so they can access the private cloud. I can enable remote support, so they can connect to it, look at the issue, and resolve it remotely. It's top-notch support. We've never had a problem with them. Everything gets resolved as quickly as possible.

I never had to deal with support for GFI MailEssentials, but I know that people in those positions struggled with their support at times, so I would say SpamTitan's customer service is much better than competitors.

Positive

We were using another product called GFI MailEssentials, and the difference between SpamTitan is like night and day. We had all kinds of malware go into our inboxes, so we needed to sift through it to get to the real meat of the issue.

We function better with this product because we don't have any downtime. We haven't had any virus infections since implementing SpamTitan. We took a massive hit with GFI MailEssentials, and it took our entire network down. We had to rebuild everything manually, so we did a lot of research to find a better solution. This is what we landed on after months of research.

The deployment was relatively fast. It took a little bit of time to spin up the private cloud and around a week to deploy SpamTitan. I'd say it took about two weeks from start to finish.

The maintenance and configuration are straightforward. I configured this solution back in 2018, so it's been close to four years. I do updates and other tweaks periodically. I might change some allowlists, but it requires little involvement after the setup. It pretty much runs itself.

I worked directly with SpamTitan and implemented the solution.

We've definitely seen a return. When that security incident happened in 2017, I can't even tell you how much that cost us. There was a lot of downtime. I'm sure it was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. SpamTitan costs less than $5,000 a year. It's worth it to keep us out of those situations.

We pay around $4,200 for a license, so it doesn't come out to that much per user. It's about $8.40 per user annually. You just can't beat that. I don't know if people negotiate that down further, but TitanHQ tried to raise the price on me after we had been using this solution for a year or two. 

I told them we had already budgeted for the amount we've been paying for the past two years, so they agreed to keep the price the same. Maybe a customer could haggle for a better deal, but I think that's a pretty good price to protect one user from spam and viruses for a year.

I rate SpamTitan nine out of 10. I recommend trying it out. TitanHQ will work with you. I can't remember if I did a trial beforehand, but I know there were talks about spinning up a private cloud that we could try for 30 days. If they're willing to let you try it for a month, there's really nothing to lose. You can move on if you don't like it, and if you do, the solution's already in place, so you can start scaling it out.

In general, it's always good advice to research security products to make sure you have the best solution for your environment in place. Also, you need to make sure your products are up to date. Security updates are essential, and you should double-check your configurations. 

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.