TitanHQ SpamTitan Reviews

We use TitanHQ to provide email security. It sits on Office 365 and protects all emails coming into our domain and going out of our domain.

We have been able to reduce the spam count and the number of phishing attacks, which were higher before we started using SpamTitan. Our reputation has also improved because our internal and external clients are happy with the level of protection provided by this solution.

We are satisfied with the performance and spam filtering provided by TitanHQ SpamTitan. The reporting feature and customizations as per our requirements are also good.

We use SpamTitan's geo-blocking feature to block spam emails entering our network and servers. We have created rules to block certain emails, and the geo-blocking feature has reduced our spam intake by 100%. 

I would give a ten out of ten for the geo-blocking feature for restricting emails from specific destinations based on IP or country.

Our employees don't have to sort through junk and spam emails now, which saves time. Also, they have the option to release and whitelist emails that have been placed in the quarantine folder. It's a user-level feature. It has substantially improved our efficiency by 70% to 80%.

We are using the data center version with a dedicated server. It would be more user-friendly if SpamTitan were centralized. That is, TitanHQ should have a SaaS model for SpamTitan.

We've been using this solution for two years.

SpamTitan's stability is good; I'd rate it at eight out of ten. In comparison, I'd rate the stability of Trend Micro and Microsoft ATP at six or seven out of ten.

TitanHQ's technical support staff respond quickly to our emails, and they've had the right level of expertise to handle our concerns or issues. I'd give them an eight out of ten.

Trend Micro's technical support is at the same level as that of SpamTitan, whereas Microsoft's technical support is at a lower level. We have experienced delays with Microsoft.

Positive

We previously used Trend Micro and Microsoft ATP. SpamTitan has the edge over Microsoft ATP because it is more user-friendly. Microsoft ATP was very complicated to configure, but SpamTitan can be customized for our own requirements.

SpamTitan helped us to deploy the solution, and they maintain it as well.

SpamTitan has competitive pricing and flexible licensing. They allow up to 10% more that you use and then add it to the next tier of licenses.

We evaluated Trend Micro and Symantec email security and chose SpamTitan because it is user-friendly and cheaper than the other two products.

I would recommend SpamTitan and rate it at eight on a scale from one to ten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We haven't had any issues with stability

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We probably have been using this solution since 2014.

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We primarily use the solution for spam filtering for all of our internal clients.

We're talking ten years since we started using it. At the time, the products we were using took a lot of manual effort to make sure that we were blocking unwanted emails. When we moved to SpamTitan, it alleviated some of that daily work that we'd have to do to make sure we were getting clean email.

Their general spam filtering and the logging of the history are helpful.

They have a low false-negative detection. We have a lot of control over what is filtered and what isn't through creating our own rule sets.

We also use SpamTitan's geo-blocking feature. We started using that when it became available as we were doing that ourselves on-prem. We started using that when it became available last year. It allows you to block spam emails entering your network and servers, reducing your spam intake. Being able to block a whole country that our customers don't deal with is just an easy way to not even have to process those spam messages. 

I'm not sure if I can approximate by how much we've reduced our spam intake by using this feature, however. We tend to geo-block based on the country, not the IP. So far, it works. It's easy to set up and easy to make exceptions, based on either IP or domain, in case there is some email from a country that we're blocking that we have to allow through. It's very important due to the fact that we're a government agency. Blocking emails from certain countries, especially during times like this, where there are a lot of attacks coming in, helps keep us safe.

In general, the user interface is good. SpamTitan's overall intuitiveness is okay. 

The solution has saved us time. We went from doing work every day to maybe a couple of times a week to make sure the emails we are getting are clean.

The interface could be updated. I wish it was a little bit more modern. It's been the same interface for ten years and some aspects are hard to find, even after using it for years. If you don't go to a certain feature often, you have to dig around to find it sometimes. Therefore, the layout or structure of it could probably be better. 

In terms of intuitiveness, the main daily admin use is fine, however, some of the special configuration areas don't seem to be logically laid out compared to other products that we use.

The only other issue we've had is with searching the logs. It has a field for searching the "from user", yet does not have a "header from". Sometimes it's difficult to find an email when the "from" and "header from" are different, as we're only able to search the from field. This is difficult compared to other products that we use.

I've used the solution for about ten years. 

The stability is good. I'd say it's around an eight out of ten. We've had a couple of issues with running out of memory or disk space. However, support has always been able to adjust things to get them back working.

We haven't really expanded it. We have about 5,000 mailboxes that go through it. We've adopted it 100%. We do plan to increase usage.

Their support has always been very good. They're always responsive. You get to the person that is going to be working on it immediately. You don't have these different support levels to get through to get your question answered or the problem fixed.

It's very good. It's one of our best supports on any of the products that we have.

Positive

The initial setup was relatively easy. SpamTitan support helped us get it initially configured. It wasn't difficult on our side. Some of the rules we had to manually enter, and if we had a large batch of things that needed to be inputted, we could send it to their help desk, and they would make the changes for us. They were very helpful with getting it up and running.

For the deployment, I had it up and running on the same day and we were able to point our email to it.

We did have some assistance from technical support.

We have seen an ROI. Mostly due to the fact that it freed up man-hours of dealing with spam on a daily basis.

The pricing is definitely reasonable. Compared to Office 365 Defender, it's a lot cheaper.

We actually use multiple levels or multiple vendors of spam filtering. SpamTitan is our primary one. Then we have another one behind it. Then, some of our customers that have Office 365 have 365 checking things also.

SpamTitan is definitely easier to manage than the others. We haven't compared to any others that have been primary filtering, however, it's done a good job on filtering. Of course, no spam protection is 100%. That's why we run multiple solutions.

In terms of advice to others, I would say if the customer wants to get very detailed in their spam filtering and if they need something to formulate the specific patterns, this is a good solution to look into.

I'd rate this solution a nine out of ten.

It feels like we have a little bit more control with SpamTitan than we had with our previous solution. We have a little bit more insight as to exactly what's going on in the cloud. We get full logging of those mail servers. It's been great.

In addition, the solution's integration with IMAP was a big reason we went with it. While it didn't really improve our organization, it mitigated a ton of setup work we would have had to do if we had had to go with something else.

And the reporting is something that has made our business run more efficiently.

Our false positives have gone up, but what we have found is that people actually really like seeing a lot of emails denied and then being able to allow them, as needed. That's been great. It gives them more control over what's coming in.

There are two things I find extremely valuable. They are among the most important things for ongoing administration purposes.

The first is that the product offers both inbound and outbound spam filtering and it enables amazing reporting. It's very specific and very easy to track down.

For example, if somebody calls us and says, "Hey, I'm having a problem not getting an email," or, "I'm having a problem sending an email," or, "I sent an email and it's not showing up," the discovery work to resolve those kinds of things has gotten so much easier because we can see what's going on right at the edge of our incoming and our outgoing email. A regular tech support dude can log in and type in very little information about what the customer is calling about, and get a very practical view of what is going on from address to address or regarding a subject line. They can filter on all sorts of different things.

That's probably the most important feature because we do get a lot of people who question our mail service. Now, unlike before, those requests don't come to me. They're very easy for our tech support department to look into and give the customer an answer right then and there.

The second valuable feature is built-in rate limiting. I haven't played with it yet because we have our own rate-limiting solution built into our mail solution on site. But when that needs an update or when that stops working, you better believe that's going to be something I'm going to lean on in the cloud because it's already there. It's already set up. I will just have to type in what we want it to do. That is a value-add. And my boss, the CTO, spoke up and was excited about that as well.

The admin user interface is very granular. Anyone who is in IT can relate to the statement: "With anything granular, there is going to be a little bit of complexity." It can be difficult, on a layer-by-layer basis, to wrap your head around it.

Because the administration interface is so granular, some of the categories and some of the settings end up in really odd places. It's hard to figure out where a certain setting is sometimes. I brought up the issue to our sales guy and, from what I understand, they're working on that.

But it's also something I can appreciate because it gives me the flexibility to delegate control to anyone in our organization, whether it be us, as the global administrator, or our tech support people and I only want to give them access to certain domains. I can also give control to a customer who registered a domain through us and who wants to manage their own domain. I wouldn't say it's super-intuitive, but it is granular.

Also, a little bit more email that is categorized as "clean" is coming through nowadays. But with that said, it's doing a great job at blocking a lot of the more obvious, blatant spam—the newsletters and the marketing stuff that you can usually unsubscribe from. Those are the types of emails that 90 percent of people don't want. But compared to our last spam filter, it does let a little bit more email through that is categorized as "clean."

We've been using TitanHQ SpamTitan for just over one year. Just a few weeks ago we got our one-year renewal.

It's been extremely stable. Everything that it uses has worked. It has built-in error alerting and that has worked. That has told us about what's not working or what's filling up. We're happy with it.

From one to 10, where 10 is "most important" in terms of our requirements for this kind of solution, stability is a 10. That's our number-one priority. We have about 18,000 users in total, and if the solution goes down we start getting a lot of calls.

From my understanding, the solution is in AWS and TitanHQ can very quickly stand up extra virtual machines and add them to the cluster. The scalability is infinite. I have zero worries about scaling.

They have amazing tech support. They went above and beyond. During setup, they gave us templates for our end-user customers that we could put our name on. They trained our tech support guys. They also reach out once in a while and say, "Hey, it looks like you have an update available for your server. Do you want us to do that, or do you want to do that?" They're very nice. They're not too pushy or annoying. They actually add value, which is a breath of fresh air.

I wish everyone would care and respond the way these guys do. I can't think of another example of where I have been impressed by a vendor's tech support. I have very low expectations when it comes to tech support, typically. They generally do not add any value. I usually feel that I need to pick up that slack and be that person. It's been great that I can actually throw a question out to them and get an answer in layman's terms; something that I understand. They will go above and beyond and actually offer a little bit extra when they reply. That's nice because I don't know their product. They're trying to teach me a little bit more about it so we can both win.

Positive

We started with a product called Roaring Penguin. We ended up getting forced out of that solution due to some company buyouts. They were purchased by AppRiver. The thing that was unique about Roaring Penguin was a very unique way of authenticating our users, which we wanted to keep consistent.

We wanted to keep our infrastructure intact and not have to build anything new. A lot of the new spam filters required some sort of LDAP authentication and we were using IMAP authentication. It was great when we found out that not only was SpamTitan less expensive than a lot of the other solutions, but it was very granular and allowed us to do things that we had been doing already with our previous spam filter.

In terms of the stability of SpamTitan versus Roaring Penguin, they are both very good.

I've been dealing with email since I was a teenager, so for me the setup process was really intuitive. Email, for the most part, is black and white they allowed me to set this up in phases and to test it in phases. I had all the confidence in the world, when we were ready to cut over to it, that it was going to at least flow and that everything was going to work correctly. Everything was tested and from there it was just a matter of tweaking things. I didn't need help to set it up, so overall, I thought it was intuitive.

When setting it up, we had a rocky start with just a little bit more spam coming through than we previously had. That was expected to a certain degree because we didn't move a lot of our rules over to it. Our users had done custom whitelisting and we had no practical way of moving that over.

SpamTitan tech support did a great job at giving us a generalized solution for that, which people actually preferred. It was more of a, "We'll catch everything and you guys let through what you want" approach. That has done just an outstanding job. We've been hands-off since the first couple of months and it's been great.

The prep work for the solution took about a week. After that, it took about another two weeks. Week two was cut-over and dealing with some of the extra spam that we were getting. In week three, I focused on outgoing spam filtering, and that also took a little bit of support.

In terms of maintenance of the solution, most requests get funneled my way. There have been things delegated to our tech support department. They have been given training directly by SpamTitan, which I thought was really cool. The training was also recorded and we let our new hires watch that training. There aren't a lot of escalations that come my way. I don't even hear about 95-plus percent of the tickets because they're able to whitelist or blacklist something on behalf of a user very quickly. Beyond that, I get involved with things like a spam campaign. I track down where it's coming from and how best to block it.

We evaluated AppRiver and SolarWinds' Spam Experts. We went with SpamTitan because it was the only one with IMAP authentication. But it was not only that. They had a name out there and good reviews. I felt good about using them.

My only advice is that if you're forwarding email to external addresses, and also make use of the outgoing email filter, you may want to test that scenario.

It is web-based, but all our emails go to their site and get scrubbed. Thus, we only get the ones that we whitelist. Or, they have a scoring system and send them through to you.

It is way more than just spam filtering. The reason I bought it was not just to control our spam, but to stop the evil guys from sending us phishing or all sorts of harmful emails. I can see the daily or weekly reports of how many of those types of things that it stops for me.

My employees rest a little easier since previously they would be afraid to open up emails. We get emails from people we don't know all the time and need to look at those. Now, with SpamTitan, I don't have to be fearful that they might open up something nasty.

I might have about 50 spam emails a day. If they came into my regular email, I would have to pick through them. That would take a lot more time. Because SpamTitan scores them for me, I can see pretty quickly whether they are needed or not. I probably only get two or three out of every 100 emails that I want to bring back into my whitelisted emails. They do a really good job for me.

They have a feature where you can export your email addresses, so they can go onto the whitelist or blacklist. I think I am supposed to call them allowed or not allowed now, but I like this feature a lot. 

I like its reporting. I can tell a lot about the activity and things that are going on with my people, I can see it in all their reports.

The solution's overall intuitiveness is pretty good. I am pretty experienced at web and computer stuff, and I had no trouble.

You can go through SpamTitan's report a whole lot faster than you can just go through all your emails because the spam ones just never hit your email.

We have been using it for four or five years.

It seems very stable to me. I haven't seen any issues.

They sold me a package to cover 10 emails. I am sure they can sell you a package to cover 1,000 emails. I would think it would be very scalable.

TitanHQ's overall support is excellent. I would rate them as nine or 10 (out of 10).

The few times that I did have to reach out for support, they solved my problems very quickly. I just haven't run into any troubles that they weren't able to fix within a day. We have never been down without our email.

I would give their support nine out of 10 for their expertise, attentiveness, and speed of response versus competing solutions.

Positive

It prevents nasty emails from getting to my people, and that was what drove me to them way back when. I had an email get through. Somebody opened it, and we had a critical problem. Fortunately, my IT people caught it within an hour, having backups and everything. We got back to normal pretty quickly, but it could have been devastating.

The main reason that I went with SpamTitan was the price. It had to be reasonable. Also, I wanted to get my 10 people covered so I didn't have to worry about going out of business tomorrow because of a phishing email.

The setup was a little difficult, but they did have people who helped me so I eventually got there. They had a change and my IT people had to do some stuff. There was something about pointers. I don't remember the details where we had a little trouble, but they were changing some things around.

The initial setup was done in about four hours.

I am pretty sure they sent me an instructional email, video, or something. I followed that as best I could. I did have to call support who helped me to get it set up correctly.

I have seen ROI. I look at the reports and can see that several times a month a nasty email gets prevented from showing up on any of my employees' devices.

I have been really happy with them. For the price, I don't want to change.

I would recommend at least checking out SpamTitan because it has been really good for me.

I am pretty happy with the user interface experience of SpamTitan. I felt like it was pretty easy to get in, navigate, and figure it out. Some of my less computer-experienced employees had a little trouble. However, after a little training, they got it figured out.

It helped me solidify my policy about emails and such because clearly I hadn't been training the person who opened the phishing email that almost put me out of business. Once I had SpamTitan in place, I could put together a policy and get them trained on how to use SpamTitan so they were overly more aware of the dangers that a computer could bring into an office. 

We had to let people know that I didn't want them checking their Gmail or any other accounts with their office computers because it wouldn't have the SpamTitan protection.

I would rate them as nine (out of 10). It is a good value for the price.

It's used for protection and to improve our security. We have different layers of protection and this is one of them. SpamTitan's cloud is the first point where our emails are filtered and then they are delivered to us. Before everything is delivered to our Exchange Server it goes through the filter. 

In the past, spam emails were hammering our Exchange Server constantly. But now, it's going to the private cloud first and everything is filtered. The only things that are delivered are what should be delivered. All the spam is stopped on the private cloud. Our Exchange Server is not busy anymore.

In addition, in the SpamTitan portal, we can also quickly identify the status of emails, if anyone has missed an email. We can see exactly what is in quarantine and we can check that easily.

And because users can release false positives themselves, we in IT don't have to be busy doing so all the time. Users are not spammed with 20 emails. Instead, they get one email saying, "Hey, you have 20 emails which SpamTitan thinks are spam." The user can choose to tell the system, "This is not spam, it is a valid email." That has also helped save employees' time by not having to sort through junk emails.

There are certain categories of emails that are blocked and end-users don't even see them. That depends on the rating.

When we had different solutions, like McAfee® Security for Microsoft Exchange (MSME), IT had a lot of system administration work. We had to do a lot of updates. Now, because SpamTitan is a cloud solution, we don't need to worry about that. It cuts our system administration time.

Another benefit, of course, is the protection from emails that can damage your organization. We had a case before we had SpamTitan, where somebody clicked on an email and as a result, all our files were blocked and the attackers were asking us for money. Because we have good backups, we just restored from the backups and it was okay. But since deploying SpamTitan, we haven't had that issue anymore.

SpamTitan has two main features included in it. One is like ClamAV and the other is like Bitdefender. It scans for viruses. There is also content filtering and many other options. For example, you can set up filter rules, you can block email addresses and domains, and you can do pattern filtering.

These days there are a lot of emails with macros and that's a really dangerous situation. A lot of schools are being attacked. We have set it up so that anything that comes with a macro goes into quarantine first. We then get an email notification that there is a macro and we check it. Sometimes it's a false positive, but this way we can control what is released and what is not. You never know what a document with a macro can deliver. It can infect your whole environment.

We have a dashboard where we can see how many emails are legitimate and how many are spam. When people come to us and say, "Hey, we got some spam," we can say, "Look at THE dashboard. Something like 70 percent of the emails coming in are spam, so be happy it blocks all of that email."

And, we moved to something even better than that because we're now using SpamTitan Plus. It has an extra feature so that if you receive an email with a link, it goes to the TitanHQ server and that link is also checked. That is probably the best feature. It is good for security because lots of spam happens via the links that people click, or through emails with viruses and macros.

SpamTitan is also easy to use. You just set it up and everything works the way it should. The user interface is easy to use and navigate. We can quickly do system updates ourselves because we have a private cloud with access to our own server.

The way it rates what is spam and what is not spam can be improved, although that is true with every system.

I have been using TitanHQ SpamTitan for four years.

I don't have any recollection of it being unstable.

Because it's in the cloud, you can request a memory or CPU increase, if needed. From their side, it's just a matter of pressing a button because it's all virtual. So scalability is not an issue. 

And to move to SpamTitan Plus, we only needed one update and it was done.

Their technical support is fine. We have had a few calls and issues were resolved, sometimes on the same day, sometimes the next day.

I called their helpdesk and I said we wanted to increase the memory and they increased it. The memory was okay, but there is a lot of checking with the ClamAV or BitDefender and the service panel stopped and was disabled. They increased the memory and, since then, we haven't had that problem again.

I don't have any complaints about their speed of response. There's a portal that you call and, within a few hours, somebody responds. Compared to other cloud services, their support is quite good, but it's very difficult to compare. It's like apples and oranges.

Technical support was a very important point when we were considering a solution. If there are any issues and an email doesn't come in, I have a problem.  Email is a primary process and it needs to work.

Positive

We had a different system before, McAfee Security for Microsoft Exchange, but it didn't work well. Every update was a disaster. There was a lot of administrative work and it was not efficient. You can't compare it with SpamTitan.

We also used a McAfee Appliance and Barracuda in the past. When we heard about TitanHQ we requested a month or two-month trial to see how it works.

Because we have a private cloud and our own server, setting it up was easy. They did it for us, but there were some settings that needed fine-tuning because SpamTitan needs to learn what is considered spam in your organization. There was an issue at first but they solved the problem and after the first month it was okay.

Technically, the setup was not a problem for us. When deciding on a product we needed to balance the setup and the features. We tested it, no strings attached and, in that trial period, we did all the fine-tuning. When we were happy with it, we started a subscription.

In the beginning, when we set it up, we needed a little bit of time to get to know the system and to find things. But after about a month or two, we had overcome all those issues. We were able to find the features we needed, like SPF reject on failure, for example. We did that ourselves.

We set everything up with the help of their engineers and we are very happy with it.

I'm very business-minded. I negotiated with them because we are in education. I told him that we cannot pay high prices. They were quite good with the EDU pricing and we are quite happy with it.

They have to strike a balance. A product can be very good, but if you can't afford it... 

In this case, the product is good, and they were also sensitive to our situation in education, where we don't have a lot of money. We have to be very careful how we spend it and where we invest it.

We also have endpoint protection, in case something gets through the first layer. For that, we have McAfee Endpoint Protection for the computers. But SpamTitan is our first layer of protection.

In terms of our spam catch rate, one month is different from the next month. It depends on the spammers because they change their strategies, but SpamTitan can stop all of it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would rate this solution a 10 out of 10. 

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

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