TitanHQ SpamTitan Reviews

It's a spam filter, so all of the emails come through SpamTitan before it comes to us.

I can log into it and direct all my MX records and it intercepts and reads all the emails. We can then determine if something's invalid. It holds it instead of sending it off. We get a quarantine report if they've had something intercepted.

It's used just for inbound and outbound email communications. It's used for email features.

It helps protect the individual users to avoid trouble and increase productivity. They don't get their mailboxes clogged up with a bunch of garbage.

Its spam protection is excellent.

The user interface experience of SpamTitan is great. It's pretty intuitive. They do an update once and I don't have to call and ask again as it makes sense where you click and it hasn't changed. That's one thing that's nice. Every update is all the same in terms of the UI. They don't move things around. 

In terms of overall intuitiveness, I'm highly impressed. Some of what I use daily, if I log in and try to look up a report, add an email, block somebody or search histories, how to get there, find it, and set the filters seems very intuitive. I don't get into it very often - maybe once or twice a month if something comes up. However, I'm always able to easily now give my way around without having to go look up old notes or call support again and ask another question.

SpamTitan has helped improve the false positive rate although I'm not sure by how much. It does a great job of validating and inspecting emails and making a decision on scoring mechanisms. There are also other options where I could go in and add other levels of features that I want to score against. I don't find very many emails being captured that shouldn't be. 

I've worked with different spam filters and I actually like SpamTitan the best. It's great and it's also a lower-cost option. It seems to work better than any other option I've ever used. Participating with end-users and the quarantine email seems a lot more simple for them to understand and to just click and release, allowing options. It's very easy for me to go into, make changes, and navigate. 

SpamTitan has helped save employees time by not having to sort through junk and spam emails. I don't get many calls where people are trying to find an email and are having a hard time. Once a month somebody says, "Hey, I can't find this email." Or they ask a question. However, in general, it saves a lot of my time.

Getting users to clean up their mailbox really has nothing to do with a spam filter. That's another story. However, this definitely helps reduce the number of garbage emails they receive. The other solutions have got more passing through than this one would, or probably a lot more false positives where the legitimate email they're looking for was being intercepted. This product definitely is more productive.

In terms of time savings, it's been easier for me as the person responsible. I don't have to deal with phone calls when there's a problem. I had more issues to deal with using the prior solution than I do with this one.

I'm not 100% sure how well they scan certain attachments. I know spam filtering is a huge game in a constant battle, however, sometimes you'll get some just obviously bogus emails coming through with an attached file that they're just praying for you to open. I don't know if there's something they can do to help catch some of those. Other than that, just keeping up with day-to-day changes, it's a constant battle with spam, so there's never a perfect solution. That's never perfect 100% of the time.

I've been using the solution for over two years. It's been almost three.

I'm pretty impressed with the stability so far. This will be the end of three years coming up and I know they're in a different country, however, they're still there and still working. We haven't had any issues.

It's already over licensed beyond what I even use, just based on the way it was sold. I don't perceive myself as outgrowing it. If I needed to, I could just increase the license by paying more money.

It's scalable. I have to use the full capacity of what our email transactions are and since it goes through them first before it hits us, we don't have to waste the bandwidth on all those bad emails.

I've been pretty pleased with technical support. They're pretty responsive. They answer quickly. They come up with solutions really quickly as well. They don't feel like they try to blow you off with excuses. They seem pretty knowledgeable about the product.

With my key provider in the past, going through their channels was slow. With these guys, I can call up and within two minutes, somebody's on the phone and they're in the system and we find the answer. We're usually done in 20 minutes or less.

While, for me, support is not of high importance as the solution just does what it does and moves along. That said, it sure is nice when I do need to reach out that I have that quick response. If their support wasn't as good, would I still use the product? Yes.

Positive

I've used spam filtering before. I found these people and did some examples and sessions with them and just decided I like their product and I just quoted it and said, got an authorization.

I didn't really care that the other product had an integration with an MSP client and we were separating from them. It made it difficult to sometimes access the email. We had to contact them for support. The transition to this was a matter of just getting it plugged in, typing in some of my domain, my information, updating my records and I just started shooting at it. 

It was incredibly easy to set up, configure and then start using SpamTitan. I pretty much can't live without spam filtering nowadays. 

The deployment took maybe three hours.

I first set it up with all the information and verified that it was good to go. Once I was done, I swapped my records in the public world and I stopped using an old service and I started flowing right through them. If I had any issues or concerns, I could change those records back. I had the new service and the old service running together for a little while until I finally decided it was time to get rid of the old stuff.

I worked with their support in the transition. It really went flawlessly, as far as the end-users, they had no clue, there was no downtime. Mostly I handled the implementation myself and if there were any questions I had, I worked with their technical support.

I'm not sure if looking at the solution from an ROI perspective is applicable for this product.

There haven't been any other costs in addition to the standard licensing fee. They did recently reach out as they're offering another service that's an add-on license that'll do some URL scanning. We talked about it. We just haven't pulled the trigger yet. Other than that, there's never been any additional costs and even their yearly renewals haven't changed by increasing at all.

I don't really have any specifics like you should do this or do that. I just purchased a yearly license at a time. It's not a monthly thing. I just pay upfront for the whole year.

I did look at a few solutions that I had touched myself in different places. I did some Google searches, however, their cost of licensing compared to everyone else is an amazingly different charge. I thought I'd give them a shot. This will be my third year of renewals at the end of this year and I have no intentions of not renewing with them.

I'd advise those considering the solution to go for it. I felt a little iffy at first that they're not based in my area. I took a chance on them and I'm extremely happy.

I'd rate the solution a nine out of ten. If they were actually able to catch the people sending the spam, I'd give them a perfect ten.

We sell communications solutions to companies like Microsoft, Cisco, 8x8, and RingCentral. We mainly use SpamTitan for basic email filtering. We don't use geoblocking because most of our client companies' employees work remotely, so we're working with users in India, Bulgaria, the United States, and multiple destinations in Europe. We might configure it one day, but not now.

Each employee gets a report every morning, and we authorize them to release the emails they want from quarantine. It's their responsibility. We are all working remotely, so our antivirus and other security solutions don't work well unless everyone is connected to a VPN. We are seeking a cloud solution for that. 

In the meantime, SpamTitan is much better for our users. They can check their spam reports and see whether those emails are really spam or not.

In the past, our users opened a lot of support tickets because they didn't get an email they were expecting and they couldn't find it in quarantine. We had some problems with our previous solution. It's much easier to track emails in SpamTitan and find them. 

Our previous solution's configuration was complex, which made it harder to provide support for our users. You had to go through three or four tabs to find the email you were looking for. SpamTitan has one tab where you search all the reports and emails. It's easier to manage when someone complains they didn't get an email because it has some kind of attachment. 

We haven't had many issues with false positives since we optimized SpamTitan's configuration. We only had one false positive, but it has worked perfectly otherwise. There was a noticeable improvement in spam in the first week. After four or five days, it was obviously much better than before. We didn't get the complaints we were getting every day.

I had some ad emails getting through the filter from time to time. I don't get them anymore with SpamTitan. It's always moved to the junk by default. SpamTitan has some intelligent features for learning which emails should go to the inbox and which should be flagged or quarantined. 

URL blocking is helpful. It will block any URL sending out lots of spam or phishing. It will rename the URL itself and send it to the user. The admin will block it, or you can allow users to release it if you want. 

SpamTitan doesn't allow you to customize the frequency of reports. Sometimes our users complain that they cannot control how often SpamTitan's report comes. Users get a daily report, but some would prefer a notification every time an email is quarantined. 

Our previous solution sent out immediate alerts when an email was quarantined. Some people prefer it, but it doesn't matter to me. I get the report when I start my day, and that's fine. 

We've been using SpamTitan for around four months. 

I rate TitanHQ's customer service 10 out of 10. I've contacted them twice in the past few months. They were highly responsive and resolved issues quickly. I don't think there was much difference between TitanHQ's support and the service we got from Barracuda's team. 

The main difference was the solution. Even if I got the support quickly from Barracuda, the configuration or the setup was hard to follow compared to SpamTitan.

Positive

We were using Barracuda when we decided to move to SpamTitan. At the time, we were looking for the best value. It was also essential for us to have an email filtration setup that allows users to log in and see which emails were in quarantine.

The most critical factor was cost-effectiveness. SpamTitan was much cheaper than Barracuda and offered the same value. When we did a trial, we also found the console was faster than Barracuda. The console is easier to use, and the configuration wasn't complicated.

I don't have any complaints about Barracuda's ability to catch spam. It catches, but it's more complicated to categorize where it goes. SpamTitan is more straightforward. SpamTitan has URL blocking, too. I feel it's different there. 

It took us about 20 minutes to set SpamTitan up. We updated the DNS records and added a configuration to SpamTitan. That was it. The speed of the installation was crucial because we set it up on a workday. We monitored it for the next 24 hours and had no issues.

Our COO did a search on the internet. We looked at multiple options but only tried SpamTitan. We found that it was the most suitable.

I rate SpamTitan 10 out of 10. 

It is used for any filtering pertaining to email: viral filtering, scam filtering, and spam filtering. We have implemented it in all our existing customers until now.

We implemented it at one of our largest customers, specifically to knock out viral intrusions on Microsoft 365 platform. It virtually eliminated them, which saves them money because we are not continually battling viral outbreaks for them.

Because of the random nature of attacks, we could have gotten three attacks in a month, but SpamTitan has taken that to zero. We could have gotten one attack in six months, but SpamTitan has taken that to zero. It is difficult to quantify that. By far, it is far more costly to battle a viral outbreak than it is to pay for SpamTitan.

It is a very easy product to use. There is one interface that services all our clients' health. Once learning the interface, we don't have to learn another one for each client. It is the same interface, which is valuable. Therefore, we find the single interface the most valuable since I have a very small team. I don't have one or two people dedicated to just SpamTitan. We all need to learn the interface and be fluent in it. So, having a unified single interface is a big deal for us. I don't have to teach my people five different interfaces in order to be managing a product. They use one interface for all our clients. It is a single pane of glass, which is huge for us.

The geo-blocking feature has reduced the amount of viral intrusions from foreign countries, especially recently. We saw an uptick in attempted viral intrusions in SpamTitan right after Ukraine was invaded. Most intrusions were coming from Russian pilot countries. The geo-blocking feature stopped a lot of that.

The geo-blocking feature is very easy to use. We pretty much set the filter up, then blocked a set number of countries. If another country comes through, and we see garbage coming from it, then it is very easy to block. If we have specific sites where we have to allow site X through from that country, that is also very easy to do.

We had problems initially when first implementing eFaxing. We had problems trying to get eFaxes to be recorded correctly and come through correctly. That was resolved fairly quickly. However, if you are heavy users of E-fax, I would suggest that you test your eFax before implementing so you can have that ironed out before going live.

We had to do some stuff with eFax in order to get eFaxing to come through. Had we known that ahead of time, we could have had that ironed out before we went live. However, we just didn't realize it was going to interfere with it. After we implemented it, we realized it was interfering with some of our eFaxes, so we had to go figure out why. SpamTitan's tech support was very good. They helped us figure it out. We got it implemented pretty quick and fixed pretty quick. But, in hindsight, that would probably be the one thing where I would say, "Go check your eFaxes. Make sure that they all work."

When we first implement SpamTitan, there is a report that gets sent to the end users on a periodic basis. Basically, the email comes with three links on it, and it says, "If you don't want to receive this, click on this link. If you want to receive this once, click on this one. If you want it to continue to come through, click on this one." It's a pretty straightforward, well-written email. However, we get customers who, for some reason, don't understand it. I am not really sure why. I think it is pretty clear and easy to understand. If there is anything that could be improved, it would be that process. I am not really sure what you could do to improve the process since my tech support guys, who work with us are saying, "Why don't people understand this email?" I am like, "I really don't know." We don't see why they don't understand it. It is not everybody either, so it is not like everybody doesn't understand it. There are just a handful of people who are like, "I don't understand it." It is like, "How can you not understand that? It's pretty well-written."

I have been using the solution since July or August last year.

It has been very stable. We have had no instability problems with it at all. It has been pretty much 100% uptime.

It is pretty scalable. In less than a day, we just went from one customer on it with 700 users up to about 2,000 users with no performance issues.

There is a lot of stuff on the user interface, but it is very easy to use. It's very well-organized and easy to find what you are looking for. When we can't find what we are looking for, which happened a couple weeks ago when I was looking for a particular feature and couldn't seem to locate it, their tech support is phenomenal. They usually get right back to you. 

The technical support is excellent. We have used them several times. We have had a couple of incidents with eFaxes where we were having problems getting eFaxes to come through correctly. They were able to not only help us determine why they weren't coming through correctly, but help us resolve the problem pretty quickly.

We have worked with competing solutions. I think their tech support is over and above their competitors. Their tech support comes back to us very quickly. They very easily understand the problem and their solutions are usually dead on.

I would rate their technical support as 10 out of 10.

Positive

We went with SpamTitan mainly because of cost.

The implementation was very easy. It took us less than two hours to do our initial implementation. We recently implemented 15 more customers on it, and one of my tech support guys did it in less than a day.

The geo-blocking feature took us a little bit of time to implement, as we tried to figure out which countries to block. 

It has a fair, reasonable profit margin. 

SpamTitan has helped improve our spam catch rate and reduce our false positive rate by at least 70%. If we are tracking viral intrusions, it is even more than that. It has virtually eliminated viral intrusions.

Everything has really been great with the pricing and licensing. In fact, we just implemented ArcTitan because everything was going so well with SpamTitan.

We evaluated other solutions. We really didn't implement them anywhere because they either didn't seem to do enough or didn't have a decent profit margin. They just weren't really worth our while. There was another solution that did everything SpamTitan does. It does a great job, but it was just far too costly.

It is a very good product. I am very happy with it.

There are five of us working with SpamTitan, and we all wear multiple hats. I am the president of the company, but I also do tech support. I have tech support guys and that is all they do. We all wear the same hats. That is why it is important to have that single interface that is very fluid and easy to use. That way, all of my people can learn it very quickly and easily. So, we can manage it without a big learning curve.

SpamTitan has other suites. They have WebTitan and ArcTitan. We have recently purchased ArcTitan and are using it. We will also probably be moving into WebTitan.

I would rate it as 10 out of 10. It is a great product.

We are using the spam filtering and the graylisting features for emails on Microsoft Office 365. In general, we are using their geo-blocking feature and email protection for malware, spam, phishing emails, etc.

We are pretty happy with it. The solution is pretty good. We have been able to block a lot of unwanted emails and attacks with it.

The most valuable benefit is the regained productivity for the IT team who used to do all the filtering manually before we had SpamTitan. We were able to leverage its spam blocking and email protection, getting back a lot of productivity hours for our IT team to focus on other aspects of the business.

The most valuable feature would be the customizable policies that we use for routing emails. Since spam is evolving every day and finding new ways to attack, we have to do some tweaks in email policies, how to deal with the DeMark configurations. 

I like the zero-day attacks blocking feature. We were able to block a ton of spam emails and phishing emails coming from the outside. 

Sometimes, when there is an email thread, one of the emails doesn't have the same score of protection as the other emails, then the system might trigger that this is spam and graylist it. However, it looks at the overall thread and doesn't block the email. We were using a spam filtering software before that was very aggressive and that was blocking a lot of clean emails.

The geo-blocking feature really works. We can identify certain IPs based on geolocation, e.g., known IPs as well as identify a lot of databases based origination. It has been really helpful in blocking these kinds of emails. The geo-blocking feature has reduced our spam intake by 95%. Every once in a while, we get emails that bypass the geolocation, then we end up getting the spam. 

The documentation for how to configure it could be better. Sometimes, it was confusing. When we were onboarding with them, the documentation was a little bit vague on how to configure the DNS server and our email server. It took a little bit of time, but we were able to actually reach out to their support. 

For the UI, I would like to see clearer verbiage of the links. When you go to the UI, the wording can be improved, e.g., how the description of features is displayed. Other than that, it is pretty self-explanatory.

We have been using it for about six months.

We haven't had any issues with stability or uptime. It has been pretty good.

For now, it has been handling really well the volumes of emails that we are getting. So, it is scalable for any small- to medium-sized business.

We are monitoring around 20 mailboxes.

There are no plans right now to expand with the service that they are providing us. Right now, it meets our needs.

We only used their support once, so I cannot really judge the support capabilities of SpamTitan. We didn't really need it, except in the beginning when we were configuring the service.

There was a gap of about a year between Proofpoint and SpamTitan. For about a year, we were only using the GoDaddy Advance Email Security plan, but it wasn't really good. So, I was shopping around and actually considering Proofpoint again, since I have experience with them and was pretty happy with their service. I also looked at a lot of other service providers, like Barracuda. Then, I looked at the reviews for SpamTitan. The pricing was much more competitive than other solutions, so I was like, "Okay, let's give it a try." 

The setup and configuration were okay. From my experience with Proofpoint, SpamTitan took a bit more time to configure, about a week. Overall, the solution is fine; it is not bad. Anybody with a background in email servers would be able to configure it easily with no issues.

We didn't really need to do anything in terms of planning. We didn't need to do any data migrations or integrations with other solutions.

It was straightforward. Once the configuration was done, and we switched it to SpamTitan, that downtime was about half an hour. In terms of planning ahead, we just needed to tell everybody in the organization that you may experience a bit of disconnect in emails. That didn't last for long. We didn't have to have a contingency plan or anything like that.

In the beginning, we had false positives because we have a lot of emails originating from overseas. The system usually gray lists these emails and false positives, but we have been able to train the system. Every time that we get a false positive, we tell it that it is not a spam email. So, in the first few months, I had to go to SpamTitan's portal and unblock a lot of emails. That would be at a rate of maybe three or five emails out of 500 emails a day, which is not terrible. Right now, we are doing that maybe twice a month.

We have absolutely seen ROI. The regained productivity hours that we were able to claim since we automated the email protection have been really good. Our team of three people has seen an increase in our productivity, by around 30%, since implementing SpamTitan.

User interface is not terrible. It is not as user-friendly as other solutions, but it is okay. At one time, we used Proofpoint, which was actually very easy to configure and user-friendly. You don't have to have an IT background for its configuration. SpamTitan is a little user-friendly, but it is very functional. 

Specifically for the geolocation, we have another layer of protection coming directly from Microsoft Exchange Server. So, we have been able to catch whatever has been missed by SpamTitan in the Exchange Server. While the ability to restrict emails from specific destinations in SpamTitan is really good, I wouldn't say that we rely on the feature 100%, which blocks about 85% to 90%.

We have been happy with it. SpamTitan is one of the best solutions out there. It is on par with other solution providers for the same services. For anybody looking for good email protection and basic features, like malware scanning, zero-day attacks, graylisting, and customizable policies, SpamTitan is a pretty good fit. It also has good pricing.

Overall, I would rate SpamTitan as nine out of 10.

We use it as an email security gateway to filter out spam and any malicious software that is often hidden in emails. We also use their feature for scanning links in emails to make certain that nothing gets to the end-user and invite them to click on a malicious site and download some nasty software.

I'm an systems integrator and consultant and I use it for two of my clients who have on-premise Exchange Servers. 

One of the biggest benefits of being a partner of TitanHQ is their support, which  has been excellent, the few times that I've had to use them. They've solved any problems quickly. The price is also fairly reasonable and that makes it easy to integrate into smaller businesses. Also, its ease of use is a big benefit as I don't have to spend a lot of time managing it. It's mostly self-managing, once it's set up and configured. It allows me to do the many other things that I need to do.

Overall, SpamTitan has blocked spam by 99 percent. So it's a very rare instance that a user at either location will complain that some spam has gotten through.

It has resulted in happy end-users. Most people live in their inboxes these days. Having a clean inbox certainly makes everybody more productive, saving time and money. It certainly does for me, during my busy day, as well.

There are two things that make it really attractive to end-users. The first is their ability to manage their own spam queues via the end-user reports. It allows them to determine if there are any false-positives. Ultimately, every solution has false positives, but enabling the users to handle that aspect allows me to spend less time managing it. That's the most valuable feature for me.

The second is that the price is fairly reasonable. Those aspects make it an inviting solution for clients looking to protect their environments, especially because we know that email is the number-one source of hacking these days.

I also use the built-in geo-blocking feature quite extensively. I ran a report on one of the sites to see how much geo-blocking was happening, and I was quite surprised that there was a lot. I've looked at where the majority of spam was coming from, in terms of IPs, and put in blocks on those, as well as on the obvious ones such as North Korea and, certainly, Russia these days. The report I ran showed me there is a lot of potential for compromise and a lot of malicious actors in those locations.

The user interface is good, but it could use some improvement. There's a little bit of an issue with certain feature not coexisting with another feature that has similar functionality. But once you get to know it, it actually is quite simple and quite quick to navigate, and find the settings you're looking for.

The UI is a little dated-looking as well. Other than that, it seems to do the job that I require it to do, and does it quite well.

We're coming up to our first renewal for TitanHQ SpamTitan.

I was surprised that it has been very stable. Other than for updates, I have not had to restart the appliance and have not had to do much tweaking of it. Once it's installed and running, it just runs and does its job.

It's more stable than Symantec was. I found that Symantec did need to be rebooted fairly often to keep it running properly. To be fair, that was an older product and I don't know what their current offering is like.

One of my locations has 100 users, so it's not excessively large. I know that there are locations using the solution that have many thousands of users. For the number of users that I need it to protect, it does a very good job.

In terms of increasing usage of SpamTitan, I don't deal with too many locations that use an on-premises Exchange Server anymore. Everybody's going to the cloud, so at this point in time I don't have any plans to increase usage.

I haven't had to use their support too often, perhaps half a dozen times at most, but in each instance, they've been very proficient and quick to respond. I would rate them at nine out of 10. I don't want to say they're perfect, but they're close to it in my experience.

Prior to SpamTitan I was using a competing product from Symantec. TitanHQ's support is far superior to anything that I experienced with Symantec.

Positive

The Symantec email gateway is a product I used previously. Although very powerful, but it has a very convoluted and difficult to use UI. It was extremely non-intuitive. So to find the settings for the change that I needed to make took an extremely long time. And in a lot of instances it didn't actually do what I was hoping it would do. Although the SpamTitan interface is a little dated, once you get familiar with it, it's easier to navigate and to find the setting that you need to adjust.

Another important feature is the ease with which it was set up, configured, and ready to go. It took very little time to get the solution up and running.

To set up the virtual machine, the whole thing was up and running within an hour, perhaps a little more. There is certainly a little tweaking and fine-tuning that takes place within the first several days and weeks. But once that's done, it's pretty much self-maintaining. The odd time I'll check for updates and false positives, but other than that, it's pretty good.

I have definitely seen ROI from using SpamTitan. The amount of time required to maintain the product is very minimal and that has allowed me to dedicate my time and resources to other projects. Being an integrator and system admin, the more projects I do, the more money I make

In addition, because of its effectiveness in dealing with spam and malicious emails, it has enabled my end-users to be more productive as well. It has definitely increased their ROI.

The pricing of SpamTitan is about right. It's not over-priced per user. It's not super cheap either, but it is a very good product and they certainly deserve to make some money on it.

I looked at Barracuda and a few others whose names I don't recall right now. Although they were very good reputation-wise, they were very pricey for my use cases.

Anybody who is looking for an email security gateway product should give SpamTitan a very serious look. Even when comparing it to some of the big names out there, like Barracuda and Symantec, SpamTitan stands head and shoulders above some of them, and that is certainly true given the price.

We use it to eliminate spam and viruses coming in. We wanted a solution that would filter out spam and work with O365. That was also easy to deploy and cost-effective.

We have it deployed for all our users as our spam filter for all our emails.

It cuts down a lot of our spam since about half our emails are spam.

I like the daily reports that go to our users. They are very user-friendly, easy to use, and basically transparent.

The user interface experience is very good. It sends a report to everybody's email. They can look at all the spam and use a simple button to click and delete. The quarantine reports are really simple to use.

SpamTitan's overall intuitiveness is very good. I like it a lot. 

I really like the impersonation feature of SpamTitan. We used to get emails pretending to be other users. This solution is smart enough to filter out using name filtering. If I want, I could block based on our CEO and president's name. Then, if an email came from them, the solution makes sure it is internal and not somebody who is external trying to spoof their name.

I would like the ability to have users be able to send the reports more than once a day or specify when they get their spam report, since I don't think we can schedule that.

I have been using it for a little over a year. I just renewed it.

The stability has been rock-solid. Compared to my previous solution, stability is the same. I have never had a problem with stability. It has never been down.

It worked really well to implement it into our O365. It implements really well and is super easy to use.

We have implemented it company-wide. We are not a huge company, but it was easy enough to have it filtering for every user.

The support has been excellent. Compared to some of the other products that I have used, it has been far superior. Their response time has been phenomenal. It is super fast. I have used Barracuda in the past and the interface to SpamTitan is so much easier than that. It far exceeds everything. In my opinion, the support is probably one of the best and I would rate it as 10 out of 10.

Positive

I was previously using Barracuda. It was a hosted platform and costly. It was hard to use comparatively. So, I was looking for a more cost effective solution and came across SpamTitan when searching Google. When I got a hold of them, we set up the demo. They were super-friendly and it was super easy to set up the demo. They took me through how it all worked and gave me a 30-day trial. Within the first two weeks of the trial, I said, "Let's buy it," because it was that great and worked that well for us.

I really like the ease of setup. This was very important to our organization when deciding to go with SpamTitan because I wanted something that would be easy for us to implement and our users could easily adapt to it.

It took probably 10 minutes to deploy. The ease of deployment was very impressive. 

The people from TitanHQ who helped us implement it were super-friendly. It was super easy to do.

We have absolutely seen ROI in the sense of getting back time. SpamTitan has absolutely helped save employees’ time by not having to sort through junk and spam emails.

Their pricing is really good for what it does.

SpamTitan offered a demo of it. I liked the key features: 

• The impersonation feature. 
• The ease of adding to blacklists. 
• Whitelisting emails from vendors. 
• The interface was so much better all around for users to access. 
• It is very intuitive. 
• The speed to implement was awesome. 

Overall, it was cost, speed to implement, the impersonation to blocking, and then the ability to maintain the blacklist and whitelists. That has been so much easier than anything else.

I would advise other people to buy the solution. Don't mess around - buy the tool and you will be happy. I am.

It was simple to implement. It has been very cost effective. It seems to be working very well for us.

We do stuff all over the world, so we don't use the geo-blocking feature.

So far, I would rate it as 10 out of 10. It really has been phenomenal for what I am using it for. I love it, which is why I have no problem giving a review. I just recently bought another one of their products, SafeTitan, because of the love of this solution. That is how happy I have been with TitanHQ.

We have it in front of Microsoft 365 for spam filtering.

SpamTitan's geo-blocking feature is very exciting. On my old server, we spent quite a lot of time building countrywide address blocks. Now, that is completely redundant with the geoblocking. To be fair, it's not just SpamTitan that does it. I see it in lots of places. We do that regularly on firewalls.

But if we're building a new system for people, we'll say, "Do you communicate with any high-risk countries?" If they say, "Yeah, probably. What are the high-risk countries?" we can say, "We have a list of what we considered high-risk, and we can block all of those in one tick." They will say, "Yeah, please, because we get a lot of spam from various countries." That's great. And I presume that it's updated fairly regularly.

When we implemented the geoblocking, it made an immediate and obvious difference to the amount of spam that was being quarantined. It reduced the amount of spam by more than 50 percent.

Doing geoblocking by IP is hard work. It's possible, but the nature of spam is that it's sent out by the spammers using botnets and VPNs to cover their tracks. There's a lot of to-and-fro in the war against spam, but knocking out a whole dodgy country is very good.

Also, when we talk to our customers about cyber security and they mention they have spam and viruses coming in through their email, we can tell them what we can do to help resolve that. We would then look with them at either the time savings or the cost savings, versus the investment they'd have to make in the SpamTitan licensing and say, "When you look at the benefits, they are going to be much greater than the costs. Why would you not do it?"

And once customers have that kind of focus when looking at the issue, they'll make a choice and they'll stick with it. They'll probably have it in place for years because it becomes "a part of the furniture." They take it as a given that they've got protection. They're happy with what it's doing. It's removing swaths of malware and nuisance emails and they're happy that it works.

When looking at our own organization, it used to be the case that people would be looking at their inboxes every day and clearing out junk. They could potentially spend an average of about 15 minutes doing that at the beginning of a day, and perhaps have a few more goes at tidying things up through the day. Before we were using SpamTitan, every person in our company would be losing half an hour or more, every day, just de-junking their inboxes. To take that down, now, to a matter of seconds through a quick scan of the quarantine or a report is really great.

And overall, it has definitely improved our spam catch rate.

One of the most valuable features is the opportunity to quarantine things. In addition, the option to have somebody manage the quarantine on behalf of users, or to let the system send out daily reports so that users can manage things on their own, are both very straightforward.

Slightly larger customers in particular have different requirements from those at the very small end. For the larger ones, applying global rules is difficult because, even within one organization, there are many teams, such as sales at one end and accounts at the other end. That means that the types of emails that each team is processing can be very different. If all you have is a solution that looks at every piece of email and applies the same types of rules, you don't get a very smart solution. Whereas, if you can do it per mailbox or per domain, like you can with SpamTitan, that means you are effectively able to configure it almost per-user, which is great.

The user interface is fine. It's fairly quick. Sometimes it's a little bit slow in loading a quarantine list, but it's nothing that's too painful or a problem. The user interface is very workable. In terms of the solution's intuitiveness, it all makes sense.

I have noticed that TitanHQ adds new features quite frequently. If I have one little feature request, it would be that they shout a little bit more about the new features they're adding. I haven't blocked them from sending me marketing emails and I wouldn't be averse to having more of them, particularly for the new features. That's really important because it gives us an opportunity to go to customers and prospects and say, "Look, this is our preferred product, and here is what they've just brought out now."

Also, false positives may be an area for improvement. It's very rare that we see false negatives, but false positives might be an area where I, myself, could put some more effort into looking at the settings. There are various settings that could probably be optimized. Perhaps that's something in the user interface that isn't hugely clear. There is a spam score threshold through which you can reject spam when an item has greater score than the setting. I wouldn't call it counterintuitive, but it takes a little bit of thought. Having set it up, it works very well, so I am happy with it.

Finally, a minor point is that I looked at another system that had the ability to deliver to multiple inbound servers, which is something I don't think SpamTitan does, although I haven't followed up by going back to my own installation of SpamTitan to see if could I set that up there. But it's not a big deal. Most people are not going to be doing really complicated things like having multiple inbound mail servers with completely different addresses.

We have been using TitanHQ SpamTitan for more than three years. We initially bought a three-year package and that was renewed a few months ago.

The stability is fine. I don't think I've ever seen an outage of any sort.

I can't see that there would be an issue when it comes to scalability. If the software is managing millions of transactions a day, it's not going to make very much difference if you go from two million to three million a day. I would imagine it is highly scalable.

We've had very little need to talk to tech support. That says it all. I'm very satisfied with how the support works.

But for partners like us, it's the ease of access to the company that is one of the key differentiators. I'm not sure of the size of TitanHQ in comparison to some of the others, but I'm a great believer in working with SME providers. Quite often, we find that the smaller providers are much more nimble in their relations with their partners and also with their development roots. Some of the huge companies are lumbering, clumsy organizations. While it's not that I'm on a first-name basis with all of the people in TitanHQ, because that's far from the truth, the relationship with them is a lot closer than, say, the relationship with Microsoft, which is a company that it's never easy to get close to.

To be fair and realistic about it, this is just one of the solutions that we have in our portfolio. Potentially, we could put more effort into looking at the marketing resources TitanHQ have. That connects back to what I said before, that I wouldn't object to having a bit more of a push from their side regarding new features and marketing initiatives. That would prompt me to take opportunities actively, as opposed to reactively from customers when they say, "What do we do about spam?"

Positive

We originally went with Microsoft’s built-in spam filtering but decided it was rubbish. We looked around for a better solution and chose SpamTitan.

Microsoft 365 is stable but it's just inadequate. It has typical, crazy Microsoft logic behind it, whereas SpamTitan looks like something that has been developed by people who understand the problem they needed to solve. Its basic technology is very much better than Microsoft's.

SpamTitan was very easy when it came to the setup and configuration and it's easy to use. It would make it an uphill struggle if it was difficult to configure. We do get situations with other products where "difficult to install" can actually be a complete showstopper. That does not apply to SpamTitan. It's very easy to install.

For example, I have a customer that has changed their order processing software three times during the relationship over many years. While the latest one that they have, which looks very slick and modern on the face of it, the installation process is absolutely horrible. Even to do things like configuring multiple users on one PC with this particular software, requires a complete, messy uninstall, registry edits, and then a reinstall for a different user. It will not accept having multiple configurations on one PC.

When I compare that with SpamTitan, which, of course, is not working at the PC level but at the network level, that problem is never going to occur. The ease of installation and use is important. If that long-standing customer came to me and said, "We're thinking of changing again. What are the top-three things to look out for?" I would tell them, "Well, this messy installation that you have on the current one is a showstopper because it takes so much time for our team to configure it, and that costs you money."

The closer it gets to plug-and-play, the better.

With SpamTitan, the deployment was trivial. It was very quick. Going from the starting point, where you've got Outlook on a PC talking to Microsoft 365 with nothing between them, through to having SpamTitan in between the two, took minutes. And that's only done once per organization. The benefits of SpamTitan can be seen as soon as you can measure them. It's not something that takes an awful long time to get up to speed. It just works, straight out-of-the-box.

It's a very good product and the pricing and licensing are exceptionally reasonable. TitanHQ's partner program is fine when it comes to partner profitability.

I do potentially have a question about the pricing policy. It works on the basis of billing per mailbox. I thought, "Oh, that's a bit weird," when I first looked into it. On a Microsoft setup—almost everybody we deal with has Microsoft 365—you can have a lot of aliases. In a very small company that has a dozen users, they'll have a dozen mailboxes, but they may have 50 aliases. The SpamTitan product looks at those aliases as individual mailboxes. At the end of the day, that doesn't really matter, because you can count what is the unit of measurement that you're going to use, whether it is a person, a domain, a mailbox, or everything that could be an email address. I don't mind, it works. It's just, perhaps, a slightly quirky way of doing it.

Also, when I did a couple of renewals recently, the salesperson who was talking to me might not have been quite up to speed with the products and the pricing. It took me a few goes, sending emails forwards and back, to actually get an order placed and to get confirmation of the price that we had negotiated. At the end of the day it worked, so it wasn't a problem.

Back in the day, I used to run my own mail servers using Mercury Mail Servers. That was effectively an open-source package which was very straightforward and very manageable. It also had 30 third-party bolt-ons, one of which was a Bayesian spam filtering tool. It would learn on the basis of the training that you gave it, which at the time, I thought, was very clever. These days, there is a lot of spam filtering that is not all that clever. There seem to be quite a few holes in it. But when I did an evaluation of SpamTitan I thought, "Yeah, this is exactly what we want. It has everything." It has filtering, quarantine, blacklisting, and malware protection.

It’s good to be a partner of TitanHQ so that we have something in our portfolio that we can offer to people. However, there's a lot of resistance out there, particularly at the SME end of the market. When we start a discussion about how they do their malware and spam filtering, a lot of people say, "Well, it's all built into Microsoft." We might then get into a discussion along the lines of, “Yeah, it's built into Microsoft, but it's not very good. And it doesn't seem to be getting any better as time goes by, and it's very awkward to use.” Yet, quite often, we run into people who say, "We don't want to pay for an add-on when we think that it can be done with other software packages." This is our challenge when we go to prospects, or to existing customers when we're discussing upselling to them: There is still quite a lot of resistance. It's just one of those things that we have to work to overcome.

My advice would be to come to our office and we'll show it to you in action. We can show you the stats and how easy it is to add things to whitelists and blacklists and  to adjust the parameters. We can show you all these cool features it has.

Using geoblocking for allowing exemptions based on a trusted sender's IP domain or email address is okay, although we haven't done much of that yet. I can envisage situations where potentially we could, but there are cases where I have a bit of a dilemma as to whether to block or whether to not block. China is a good example of that. We could do without getting an awful lot of the stuff that we get from China. But equally, one of our biggest customers is a global manufacturing business and they have a presence in China. I can't really say to them, "Hey, why don't you block China?"

We can always take the position of blocking or not blocking on a per-country basis. And then, if we've blocked and shouldn't have, we can just set up some exceptions and probably come up with the right solution. There's work to be done but that's true of a lot of aspects of cyber security. You've got to put effort into it and you've got to keep updating what you're doing with it.

I've yet to find anybody who would come to us simply on the basis that we provide SpamTitan, but it's definitely a very good value-added tool. For in-house use it's almost invaluable because it goes back to the fundamentals of how you do spam filtering and defense.

We use it for inbound and outbound email pre-filtering, before emails reach our MS 365 environment.

Since we started using SpamTitan we've received some 22 million email messages and it has filtered out about 28 percent of all emails before they even got to a user. That decreases the overall amount of either malicious or innocuous spam. It also helps us block spam with explicit malicious intent. It's helped our business reduce our overall risk profile and helped increase our users' effectiveness in receiving and responding to email. It's pretty effective across the board.

In terms of the amount of time it saves a user, I am probably one of the top-five spam recipients within our organization. I would get 300 to 400 spam messages a week, at least. There is now a lot less chatter in my inbox.

The most valuable features are the 

• reporting
• overall filtering functionality

The reporting interface is quite simple and intuitive and provides all of the information that one would need.

The user interface is an eight out of 10. The user interface for regular users is quite intuitive. The email report that they receive is pretty self-explanatory. The online interface for administrators is simple yet really quite effective. It's really a set-it-and-forget-it, and everything is available when needed.

The documentation provided is very rudimentary. The tool itself is very easy to use, also very rudimentary. The quarantine email message that users get on a scheduled basis is something users generally don't pay attention to, like every other communication they get from IT. The formatting of the quarantined email report that goes to the users on a regular basis is a little confusing for them. That could be improved.

And that makes user communication and user training, up front, paramount to ensuring that the tool works, so that a critical email is not being blocked by the spam filtering tool.

I have been using TitanHQ SpamTitan for two years.

It's reliable and stable. I believe it is actually hosted in AWS, so it is impacted by the global AWS outages, but overall it is stable and reliable.

We've grown 100 percent since we started with SpamTitan and we have had no issues with scalability, volume, spam volume, filtering volume, whitelist volume, et cetera. And there have been no issues with reporting and doing metrics. It's completely scalable.

We have a little over 600 people using it, and maintenance requires one-tenth of an FTE. It is used extensively in our organization, across the board.

We haven't really engaged their technical support.

Positive

We used manual mail filtering rules in Office 365. The stability of SpamTitan versus our previous solution is like night and day. SpamTitan is a solution geared specifically towards email filtering, instead of manually creating new rules and extensively customizing those rules for all of the potential variants.

The stability and dependability of email security are very important for our organization. It's one of those behind-the-scenes tools that we view as incredibly important. A user may not even know that it's there, but they know that the majority of the spam is not coming through.

The deployment took minutes. It was an easy, seamless process.

Our deployment strategy included developing communication for explaining to users how to

• receive and review quarantine message reports
• set individual user settings
• report messages 
• retrieve and unblock from a list.

We then picked a date and we turned it on. It took minutes to actually enable it. You can set it up in advance and all you have to do is move your MX record over to SpamTitan and it's on and running.

Find exactly what you want out of the tool and ensure that the options it provides are what you want, and then look at the price. In our case, we made the decision to go with SpamTitan because we didn't want all the other bells and whistles that Mimecast had. We have since subscribed to other tools that do the things that Mimecast also does, but the aggregated price of those other tools is still cheaper than Mimecast.

Look at what you really want, what you really have to have, and how those things are integrated across the board, and then make your decision.

There is a stepped-up version of SpamTitan, that some users may like, called SpamTitan Plus. It doesn't significantly increase the cost but it does provide some extra features. We get those features elsewhere, so we're not subscribing to them.

We looked at Mimecast. Everything we looked at gave us the same kinds of features. Maybe one had a more polished interface or portal, but based on the complexity and usability of the portal and the overall price, SpamTitan was a clear winner.

The biggest lesson we've learned as a result of using this solution is in the area of user communication and the usability of the tool for end-users. Those aspects are incredibly important.

SpamTitan is just one tool in our tool belt but it's very effective at its job. It's quite simple to filter inbound and outbound email based on rules and public ratings for spam centers and originators.