TitanHQ SpamTitan Reviews

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.

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. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

It's a no-brainer for me. It has 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

For our clients who are big enough, and have the ability with their firewalls, we sometimes go in and put SpamTitan right on their firewalls. Or, if we are moving everybody to Office 365, then we use it that way with the Microsoft side of things. We also do a lot of refined stuff with that as well. 

We have some clients who have been around for a long time, meaning that their domain has been out there for a while and they have had a high turnover of workers. A lot of them had huge amounts of spam coming in. When we were running the Exchange servers, they were being swamped before we had something like this solution put on. Once we put on SpamTitan, it was a big relief for me. I could sleep that night. Also, it took pressure off our infrastructure. 

The deployment is fine. It works great. It is just one thing that we have to deal with, not a bunch of things. That makes it a lot easier than the way we were doing things before.

We had one company where we had to teach them about how SpamTitan works, even though the owner was teaching his employees not to open stuff and that they needed to be responsible. We then had to tell them what they have to do as well so they don't circumvent things as employees and users. One time, the owner actually opened up an email from Nigeria, and they are in Canada, where somebody was applying with a resume. It encrypted everything that they had. I asked him, "Why would you open up a resume? You're not looking to hire anybody. Why would you open something up from somewhere from someone you didn't know anything about?" This was a company that had satellite offices all around the region. It puts a lot of people out of work in a hurry. Having this type of solution put in afterwards helped a lot because they had been around for so long and had so much spam coming in. They had used their corporate emails to sign up for just about anything out there, so they were getting a lot of junk. We cut all that down, which was one of the things that has helped us. 

Once we were able to put them on to SpamTitan, because they only deal within a local area, we put the geo-blocking feature on for Canada. This saved on a lot of that stuff that was coming into them. When we turned it on, they removed about 40% of the stuff that was coming in. The spam was coming from outside of their location. So, that was a big thing. The geo-blocking feature makes sense whenever you can do it. You can also scrub the outgoing mail so you can protect yourself from getting on a blacklist, in case something was going wrong on your side of the fence. 

Another example, we have one company who wanted to make sure that credit cards and things like that were blocked. So, SpamTitan has things like that built-in.

With the ransomware stuff going on, especially with larger customers, they have to take this solution or we don't look after them. This is because we don't want our time and name dragged through the mud.

We now have tens of thousands of emails a day that we are logging for some of our customers.

Some clients don't want to know anything. Other clients like the fact that they have the opportunity to get this report. It comes in and shows them everything that has been collected. They can log in, manage all that at any time, and clean it. It is a safety net for them so they feel comfortable. In some cases, it actually helps in the education of the end user's infrastructure. You take them through and show them, and say, "You have some responsibilities and control here that you can manage. This is a top-level device to do this." Some of them really take pride in the fact that they can and want to do it. Therefore, it is a good tool that shows them why things are even being caught, how it appears, and why it is being picked up. The more that you can educate your end user, the safer you are keeping everybody.

We have just one place to go and look at things, which makes it a lot easier for us. Our users like the fact that it is granular when they look at it. Some guys are really proficient in certain areas and this lends itself to that, which is good. They can then learn the other parts that they didn't have when we were on other systems. You can just log into the back-end and can see everything or whatever you want to see. If you need to actually go through the email and look for one to release, it is easy to find. 

When the client gets it, we show them how they get daily reports. SpamTitan is easy for them to use and they can manage their own spam.

There is a built-in antivirus, we keep that turned on. It is really great.

We have set the attachment filters for inbound and outbound. We educate our people about attachments coming in. They will say that so-and-so sent us something, but it didn't come through. Well, it is not going to come through.

They have a huge amount of things that we haven't even probably thought about.

We aren't trying to develop software. We just want something to use. However, when you get into it, you can control the RBL servers as well as add ones to it, if you want to. There is your Sender Policy Framework (SPF), which is good because a lot of government agencies started using it. It is great that you can use it yourself and keep things compliant.

There are top-level domains if you want to start blocking at that level. You have all kinds of granular things. 

There are SMTP controls. 

I don't have to go into the server and do the updates. We just set the server to automatically stay updated by hour, week, etc. 

You can turn on macro scanning, which is kind of neat. 

We have the state-browsing database turned on that Google uses. We have that on ours. 

The patterning filtering is neat. Once you start along the patterns, you can see what is going on. This will sort of help with that. It is kind of interesting to see how these patterns formulate, then all of a sudden, you see what is going to happen. 

If you want to schedule and archive reports, it is great if you had to do an investigation down the road, then you can go back and look at that stuff. Because in those reports that you run, patterns will be there. Those things are really useful. 

When someone is looking at it, they find it intuitive and easy to get around on the back-end to do what needs to be done.

Before, I didn't know what some of the things would do if turned on, i.e., things that we hadn't used previously. Now, I see that they give you further information on it and take you right to a web page. That is something that I wanted done before and can see that it is there now. I did check this just the other day. That would have been a complaint, but it is not now.

Sometimes, things can get caught back in spam that you had previously released. Without going in, releasing the whole domain, and opening it up, since you don't want to do that often because the company can get infected as well, I have a couple of things that I previously released show back up again. I don't understand why this is happening, but I would like to know why it happened, e.g., did an algorithm change? It is important to know if I released an email last week why it was caught in spam the following week.

We have been using the solution for close to six years.

The stability is very good. We haven't had any issues at all with any of it. Everything that we have had an issue with is either because Microsoft Servers or Amazon servers has done something temporarily, or we have done something ourselves. The uptime has been fantastic.

From our perspective, it is very scalable because we are not a huge company. Our clients are all over the place. We have government offices, small mom-and-pop businesses, etc. We are in every sector, whether it be the retail sector, legal, government, etc. We do it all. Because of where we are located, there are not that many people who can specialize in and cover big and small businesses or organizations. Therefore, we have to look after everybody in their area and know a lot of different things.

There are all kinds of blogs and alerts. If you want to set alerts for yourself, you can do that. I haven't used it. However, when we were setting it up, we wanted to know, depending on your growth, what would happen if we brought on another bigger customer and you moved us to another system? You won't have to go through the entire setup again. You can just put multiple servers together and cluster them, then you can do all your controls from one server.

Support is really good. Recently, they hired a new person. This person works with people like us to find out if we have any issues or things that we don't like about TitanHQ's solution, e.g., the way that they do business or their features. I can just send off an email and get a quick answer that is directed to the right people, which makes a big difference to me. That is one of the biggest things that they did lately that is really good. 

I was frustrated with some of their million processes. Support got right in and straightened that all out. I know that they were probably amalgamating systems or something at the time. I'm not sure. However, that has all been sorted by one support person, and that makes my life a lot easier.

I would have rated support lower before. Everything used to be all siloed. You would go to either finance, support, licensing, etc. Now, I have somebody who will take it right to the top or to those departments, getting it straightened out. That is so important to me.

Right now, I can't complain about anything. I would now rate them as nine or 10 (out of 10). I can talk to my support person, Emma, first about something and find out whether I need to raise a ticket. I have a voice in the company that I never had before.

I like dealing with them because they are from Ireland. Sometimes, when I will call into major call centers, they are not personable. When you are talking to their staff from Ireland, it is a lot like talking to people in Canada. People are nice. I get that from all their levels, and I like that. I really do like that because I only get calls from clients when there is something wrong. So, everybody is always in a hyper state. When I call my backup support, they know that we are all working on the same level for the same thing. I am not greeted with someone thinking, "Do I really want to take this call or not?" They are polite and I am greeted with someone who is nice and genuinely wants to help. 

This is a big thing because I have dealt with some companies who were bought and taken over on the security side. We just completely left them because of their support and the way that people treated you. It is a big difference in feeling that they are nice.

Positive

We were doing some stuff with Barracuda. We had them for a few years. We also had one of the bigger solutions out there at the time; it was one of the first ones that was out. With the pricing model, I never knew where I really stood. It is alright if you have huge clients who warranted their stuff, but when we first started, we didn't have huge clients that wanted their solution. Instead, we had smaller clients. It helped us when we moved to this market with SpamTitan. I also knew where my costs were coming from. So, it was a little bit of a different move. A lot of people go to these solutions because they have huge clients at first. We didn't have huge clients at first, so it was a different way of getting into this business.

Once we moved to SpamTitan, we then looked at their other stuff, moving to ArcTitan and WebTitan as well. We use all of TitanHQ's platforms. It is a really nice system, as far as we are concerned. 

It is very easy to set up. It didn't take long at all. 

We worked with the TitanHQ team when we did the initial setup. They explained everything to us, e.g., if we wanted something on, if we didn't want it on, at what level, and how granular. That was good. When you are going with a new company, there is no way that you can know everything that you need to know about all of that. Something that is this important, you need to allow the experts to help you go through the steps, then you can go back to it on your own. 

Because the guys who are doing this on my side of the fence are in and out of it all the time, working with clients and checking on stuff, we are able to reveal the whole email without harming anything. We can look and see the entire background of where it came from and follow that through.

SpamTitan has helped us big time with improving our spam catch rate and reduced our false positive rate. This took a lot of weight off our shoulders because we were spending a lot of time managing the Exchange servers. 

When you are looking at what they were processing before people started using these cloud-type solutions, it really has made a big difference for us on the administration side. For example, when there is an attack going around the world, such as the ones on the news, that is a lot of sleep you can lose in a hurry from our perspective behind the scenes if you know certain clients who don't have this type of solution. 

All our clients warrant this type of solution. We just won't allow them to work with us unless we put these types of solutions in place, because it is too nerve-wracking. It only takes one client to decide that they don't want this, then they get infected, it affects all your staff and other clients, and then you have to spend time trying to get them back up and going again when something like this could have prevented it.

We have taken clients in and shown them how much email has been coming through. When showing them the back-end of it, e.g., the blocking and numbers, they are like, "Oh my God." Sometimes we will take a particular email and show them how much is coming through on that. We then tell them, "When you sign up for something and you use the corporate email, this is what can happen."

When it comes to the scalability of it, it really doesn't matter much because of the way that it is priced. You can put it on somebody who is small or big. I am not big enough to worry about growing out of anything that they are doing. You can put it on a different server for a bigger client, and that is not a big problem. I can still manage it from one place.

We looked at different platforms. We wanted to get into something that was intuitive on the back-end and where everything was visible from one place. 

We were the first ones for whom ArcTitan put in a Canadian server. We required mail archiving, but it had to be done in Canada because of client requirements. I couldn't find anybody in Canada that had a mail archiving server in Canada at the time, so I told ArcTitan about it. They said, "Okay, you are a customer of ours already on SpamTitan, so we will." So they flamed up a server in Canada and put it on Canadian soil, which is what we needed. We didn't have that anywhere else. Just the fact that they did that for us, and we were the first ones, it took about a month for things to get all done, but it was done. We were able to strike the Canadian server and put it on. I thought, "These people do want to do business. They care." That was great and I was impressed.

When I am talking to a client, I tell them we will be using SpamTitan. If they are a big company and require that their mail gets archived, then I also tell them about ArcTitan.

If you are starting off, do not worry because TitanHQ will help you set it up. Once it is there, if you have never used one before, it is no big deal. Once set up, you can look at it and read about it. You can see how it all works together. You get to see the movement of everything happening. You will soon understand it. It is not hard. It does have a lot of granular stuff, but only when you want to get into that does it matter. When you look at it, you get to understand it. It is like putting the furniture in the room is much easier to understand than when you are trying to picture it when there is nothing there.

For anybody who demands high-end control, I don't know what is not there. Everything seems to be all in place. I know that they are now using the new technology that is coming out, e.g., where you have the AI do some stuff.

You have some heavy-duty professionals running a global company to try and protect it and all these people. It makes me feel good that somebody big enough is doing this and they just don't hang their coat on the spam mail. They are doing archiving, where you have to understand another process - mail servers. They are also doing the web side of things. 

I would rate them as nine out of 10. The only reason that I am not giving 10 is because two years ago I would have given them a lower rating for being siloed. Since Emma has bridged all their departments for us, that has changed and been turned around.

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.

We use it to provide 100% spam protection for us as well as all of our clients. It is ultimately part of our layered security approach since not one thing can do it all. You need a lot of stuff. Therefore, they are a part of that solution.

The way that we are structured in our go-to-market strategy, this solution is part of a whole host of things. Though it is typically not the forerunner since spam is not a major forerunner, but if it is definitely a thing to be on the table, then they would be at the meetings and helping us to land deals. Security, in general, is typically something that is part of our go-to-market strategy. At that point, people want to hear about the layers of security and the fact that we have a spam filter and how that integrates with other components of monitoring their network.

Every company and person will experience spam differently because everyone interacts with accounts, emails, subscriptions, and websites much differently. From my perspective, for the five years we have been on it, I have never had a problem. I don't even know where those spam/ham buttons really are on my computer. It does exactly what I need. I don't say, "Oh. I didn't get that. Let me go check my spam." That doesn't really exist. I literally can think of one time in five years where I have said that. Then, the person sending me the email was sending a very spammy email from a mailing list type software. It was no wonder it got caught, and it was his fault. As far as the product goes, it is really good. I am sure some of our clients also don't understand how to articulate that. For them, they don't think it adds much. We do hear that noise and have to consider that as part of a product that we are going to have in our suite offering. As far as the false positives go, it is fairly solid.

In the last year, I had one company with whom we never do business. He is a painter who came to paint our office. He emailed an invoice and it went to my spam box. I texted him. I am like, "Hey, am I getting an invoice?" He was like, "I sent it." So, in a whole year, I have spent three minutes managing my spam, which is next to nothing.

SpamTitan’s geo-blocking feature helps allow us to block spam emails entering our network and servers, reducing our spam intake. We use this feature regularly because we have customers who have offices around the globe. Especially before COVID when it was safe to travel, people (from our customers) were always circumnavigating the globe. Being able to either turn it on for temporary usage or block it altogether, that versatility was a key feature that we needed. This feature is perfect for us. It gives us everything we need. Everything has been versatile enough for us in terms of allowing exceptions based on trusted vendors' ID, IP, domain, or email address.

I would rate the overall intuitiveness as eight out of 10. It is not that bad. There are just a few things. I don't know if it is a limitation of Microsoft or just a limitation of the design. There is a spam/ham button that they have. I love it, but it is not necessarily as intuitive. It is a bit tongue-in-cheek as far as a marketing ploy of good versus bad: fake being spam and good being ham. Most people who are already super self-conscious about their computers, knowledge, and skillset, they don't know what that means. To me, I love it. I think it is hilarious and clever, but I don't think it is that great for the intuitiveness of people who don't use it regularly. Those menus and options are buried in the ribbon on a separate add-in feature page versus where McAfee and other solutions used to bolt in right on your main email page. Anytime that you need to click two or three times to do something, that is always a pain in the ass. It would be nice if they had something where you could click right away in front of you and the buttons would be, "Mark as spam. Mark as good." Or, something like that, but it is their business decision.

The overall GUI is utilitarian. It has a spreadsheet feel versus a nice software that is guided. I am sure they're going to improve it over time. It could look a little prettier. It needs some lipstick. They should get rid of unfamiliar words like ham and spam, helping the user to better understand what they are clicking through.

For the couple of clients who have those unique needs that don't do business the way we do or have emails as clean as us, we have just turned off the actual spam quarantine boxes. I am finding that we are starting to do that more often, where the mail will just get forwarded through to junk with a subject line like, "***Spam****," and then the message. Having it quarantined and held in their online part makes it very tough to go check right away. You need to do multiple clicks plus sign-in. No one remembers their sign-in accounts. You need to go find an old email, which is just not great. 

If I want quarantine reports sent to me, then I get them all at 3:00 AM. As opposed to getting one sent to me every hour, then I can go check if there is something rather than delivering the malicious emails or spam. That would be something of improvement. It is just a better way to fine-tune or dial-in on reports.

Thousands of our customers really don't like the reports. They can't fine-tune or adjust when they get delivered. They have a lot of spam senders, e.g., newsletters, where they are expecting whomever they are dealing with to send them invoices, quotes, etc. This creates a whole bunch of flags of why it would be counted as spam. Logically, it all makes sense. They are not going to go buy a new ERP system for something like that. However, our customer is now super frustrated because they are now getting penalties on late payments or different things because the invoice went to their spam box.

It is easy to white label, but the damage was already done because they went and got a new vendor. They already did something else without us knowing, so there is no way to know that we have to white label it. We hear quite a bit of noise from our customers as far as just how they have to interact and manage spam.

We have been using it for more than five years.

The stability has been the same versus other security solutions that we have used. The solution is always, but so were the other solutions that I previously used.

Their services are awesome so we don't have a lot of problems with spam and viruses plaguing our customers. However, if and when something happens, they are phenomenal with their support who help and get involved. They don't make it our problem. I don't think they have ever said, "No," to us for anything.

Their tech support is awesome. When I was directly working with the techs, I would often reference SpamTitan's support as a way to parallel or mirror some of the things that we were trying to strengthen in our own support. I would rate them as nine out of 10 since there is always room for improvement.

I only hear about when things are not going very well or meeting our expected SLAs. I hear about other vendors, and it is like, "They suck. They never get back to us." I get the customer complaints about certain things, Microsoft being one of them, where things are not getting fixed and we are waiting on the vendor. Then, I have to get involved and talk to clients, give credits, etc. because Microsoft is taking forever. 

From my perspective, I know that SpamTitan has never been a problem for us or had those types of escalations. Therefore, they are performing very well.

Our tickets are usually done within an hour or less. This means we can work with the customer, reach out to a vendor, get support, and help the customer all within 60 minutes.

Positive

We first came to the solution because of an amazing sales guy named Marc Ludden at SpamTitan. I met him a long time ago. Since then, he has been promoted two or three times. I met him at a conference and we were just talking about their spam solution versus what we were currently doing. His charismatic approach and upfront promises of how things would be better seemed intriguing. For the price point, we were like, "Well, if this is even remotely close to what he is offering for this price, it is worth the risk to try them out." It was a bit of a, "Let's give this a go," and they have never let us down and we have never looked back.

Its savings for quality and service are hands-down the number one reason that we switched. I don't feel we have compromised any quality or service for our spam product. We went from using Barracuda, AppRiver, and McAfee. With TitanHQ's personable approach and boutique customer care, that is where we see a huge difference.

It is a very simple tool. Some of those other solutions are very complicated and convoluted to manage. Whereas, this is very simple and easy. It has afforded us a margin when it comes to, not just money, but the actual ability to manage a network through projects or disasters. 

The setup and configuration were super easy. Even if it was "difficult" as far as the complexity of what needed to get done, they helped. 

When you are new, they hold your hand as long and as much as you want. They did our first few deployments, then we finally said, "You know what? I think we have got this," and we started to tell them that we won't call them for deployments anymore, but they are always there to help and still are to this day. Even though we are not new, and every time we call them, there is never a thing they won't do for us.

Our pricing has pretty much stayed somewhat the same. Sure, there has been an increase or two that keeps up with inflation, but that is everybody. When we switched from AppRiver to SpamTitan, we saved about 20%. That is $1,000 to $2,000 a month. We went to SpamTitan and WebTitan. It was $1,000 savings a month for SpamTitan and another $1,500 a month savings for WebTitan.

Their superior service comes at a very cost-effective price. This is the biggest part that really allows us to remain competitive. Their pricing for us has just been great. They have helped us to be where we need to be. They really do partner with us in that way so we can get more business. They provide the right pricing, which lets us remain competitive. 

We have tried and tested Microsoft O365 spam filters, just native without any third-party, as well as the Clutter box. That was a nightmare. There is definitely a reason why third-party spam providers exist versus just using what is built into O365. SpamTitan is one of those reasons.

Customers almost don't care which spam filter it is. Almost, because it sometimes does come up, and they will say, "Who are you using?" However, we typically don't even get, "Who are you using?" Usually, if that person is technical at that other organization, that is when they're just curious. Typically, people don't even ask us what type of tools we are bringing. They just want the end result recipe of a calm network.

The geo-blocking feature is important for us. Though, it is hard to always get it perfect. That is for any provider with geofencing because you don't always get control over where Internet traffic flows from or through, or where they are running from. IPs are a little bit better, but we don't always know what hotel people are in.

They are very good. I would rate them as 10 out of 10 because there is always room for improvement.