TitanHQ SpamTitan Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We probably have been using this solution since 2014.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are an MSP and we install SpamTitan on our customers' domains.

As we are partners with TitanHQ, there are benefits that we can pass on to our customers. One of the biggest benefits is added security. Email is the primary mode of infection for viruses, and SpamTitan helps to protect us in that regard.

With respect to profitability, TitanHQ absolutely helps us. Their staff is always very kind and helpful during our interactions. We have not had any problems with their service and we continue to offer it to our customers.

Our clients have a real benefit with SpamTitan that comes from an added layer of security. The clients may not see it themselves but every day, I see how many threats have been blocked. Those threats may not have been blocked with a native solution, such as Office 365 or Google Anti Spam.

SpamTitan has absolutely helped to improve our spam catch rate, as well as our false positive rate. I do not have exact numbers available but for our customers that originally reported a high number of spam emails, they have received much less since we put the SpamTitan filter in place. They have less exposure to threats.

The employees have a quarantine report delivered to their inbox, and it shows a productivity gain for them because they spend less time filtering messages.

We make use of the geo-blocking feature for our clients. For example, we are currently blocking emails from Russia. I have not specifically analyzed the results since putting this in place; however, I was seeing an increase in threats from Russia and this was what we did to address the situation.

The geo-blocking feature is very important to us because it's an easy way to block possible threats. There are some countries, such as smaller ones in other parts of the world, that our customers have no reason to communicate with. Considering the fact that many threats come from such countries, the ability to block them based on geography is a wonderful feature. It's also easy to put in place.

We are able to put in geo-blocking exceptions based on a trusted sender's IP, domain, or email address, although we have no need for that at the moment. 

The quarantine report is easy to navigate.

The interface is a little outdated. The menus are simplistic and visually, it's pretty old. The comments that I received from people were that they did not find the interface very intuitive. They had to do a lot of searching for things. This is something that could be improved.

I have been working with TitanHQ SpamTitan for approximately one year.

The product is stable although we did have a few issues with the quarantine report, where it was not being generated properly. Each time, I contacted the support team and they put something in place to avoid such problems in the future. Now, it has been several months and I haven't had any trouble.

This product scales pretty well and the integration with other products is good. For example, it integrates with each user's mailbox. It links to them and can send information directly to each inbox. 

We have between 20 and 25 customers now on the service, and more than 100 on it in production.

TitanHQ helps us with any technical difficulty that we are having.

I would rate the support a ten out of ten. They helped us many times and were always very professional. They provided much more information about the problem and solution that I had asked for, exceeding my expectations.

When compared to other vendors, my experience with TitanHQ support has been much better, and not even on the same level.

Positive

We used to use a local solution, called Zerospam. However, they were bought by a competitor and after that, the service was really poor. Consequently, we had to choose another product to continue offering the service to our customers.

We did a lot of research and chose TitanHQ primarily based on the comments of other IT professionals.

With respect to our customers, most or all of them were using the default Office 365 spam filter. We promoted SpamTitan and installed it, and there was no case where our customers initiated the switch from one product to another. We did not offer them alternative filter options.

The initial setup is pretty easy, and I didn't have any big issues during the process. The support was helpful when I had questions about the configuration.

The pricing for this solution is fair, and comparable with other products.

I have used the spam filter with Office 365 and find that the quarantine report is clunky, and not as easy to navigate as compared to SpamTitan.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

The geo-blocking is doing a very good job. I look at our SIEM to see from which countries we're getting attempted logins through Office 365. I started to correlate that with places we were getting spam from, like Brazil. We were also getting a fair amount of stuff coming in from the usual suspects, like China and North Korea. But Brazil was unexpected. I never would have guessed that there's a large hacking community down there, or machines there that are owned by hackers in other countries. The geo-blocking is important for reducing the exposure that we have.

For example, we can geo-block something and then we don't have to inspect a blocked email for a virus. Before we enabled geo-blocking, we were getting embedded viruses, and it was catching those, but now that's being caught by the geo-blocking feature.

Because our end-users are not getting spam, I'm not getting messages where people say, "I think this is spam. What do you think?" I used to get something like that six or eight times a day, so SpamTitan has definitely helped save time.

And in comparison to our previous solution from Barracuda, SpamTitan has reduced our spam by a factor of three.

I'd read that the portal software was dated from the UI perspective, but when I use it, it is very logically laid out. That is one of the things I like. I'm able to get to what I need to very quickly and manage it efficiently. Once I understood the model of how they were doing things, it was very easy to work with.

In addition, I looked at the reporting and about one-third of things that come are not spam, but they are blocked and they need to be blocked because of our rule sets. They're failing DMARC; SPF records are nonexistent. Another valuable feature is "nonexistent recipient." That eliminates a lot of noise that we would get, such as things coming in for former employees. We just don't need that mail.

The training for end-users could be improved. I would like to see a video that says, "Here's the solution and what it will look like." It would be helpful if they had something like that to set expectations.

For example, some of our end-users would go in and delete a message through the solution but they didn't know there was a popup that was part of that process. They weren't allowing popups. And then they couldn't understand why the message they had deleted was still in their mailbox when they knew that they had deleted it.

There was a disconnect regarding how things function, so they need something to show the end-user, very simply, what to expect and how you do things. They have it documented in text and with screenshots, and we went through that, but these days all of our training is done with short, three-minute videos, and people prefer that. They're not going to read anything.

We've been using TitanHQ SpamTitan in earnest for 60 to 90 days. We were testing it for about three months before that.

The stability is good. 

My concern is about what would happen if it goes down. Is it load-balanced? Is there a cluster on the other end or is this just one single server? As a mortgage bank, email is critical and everything is time-sensitive. If that's an option, or it's something that is built-in, I'm not aware of it.

From what I'm looking at, it's probably a single server having fault tolerance with two nodes. I come from regional banks and international companies and we always have multiples for failover. We're a small company and I don't know that we could afford that kind of redundancy, but I haven't had a discussion with TitanHQ about what that would look like or what it would cost. I could bring that to our executives and say, "Is this something that would be valuable given the cost?" If they were to say no, and then we had an outage, it could get expensive on our end.

The support hours are tough for U.S.-based companies like ours, because they're in Europe. They did tell me that they're opening a support office in the U.S. There is, currently, some overlap in support, but it's difficult to get real-time support and, a lot of the time, I just need a quick answer.

That could be improved. It's not an untenable situation but it is a little bit frustrating when I've got users saying, "Hey, I need this or that," and I really need to know how to configure it.

When I do get somebody in support, they're on top of it and they do a great job, but sometimes there's a delay in getting a response.

I had to become familiar with all the different features, and how they classified things a little bit differently. But they do a good job on the help desk side of it. We had a couple of issues where the documentation wasn't there and they agreed. Two days later I was on their help site and I saw that they had built a more specific page for that. It was really encouraging that they're on top of it.

The quality of the support is great. The people I've worked with are great. It's the timeliness. Sometimes it takes a little while, going back and forth, to get the right person.

For Barracuda support we went through a service provider and it typically took a day or two before we would get a response, so SpamTitan is much better.

But compared to other companies, SpamTitan is on par with what we would get from Microsoft or Cisco, given that we are a regional bank and a larger account. With those companies, I can usually get a hold of somebody on the phone within an hour to four hours. With SpamTitan, it is mostly through email, back and forth. That means there are some delays. Sometimes, being able to talk to somebody and just say what I need to do would be better than doing it through emails.

The best support I've ever gotten, as a reference point, has been from Nutanix. That might be a model that they want to look at. I got better support from Nutanix on products that weren't even theirs. I had problems with VMware and their engineers helped solve the problem, which really engendered my confidence in their product.

Positive

Our company has been doing managed service for 10 years with two different service providers. My job was to come in and stand up an internal IT department because they weren't happy with the services. I've been in IT for over 40 years and I typically fulfill a CTO role and help companies get their IT functioning during a major merger or acquisition. My current company is constantly in a merger and acquisition phase.

I looked at the products that our company was using but, because there was no IT department, we weren't really getting value out of those products. In all fairness, the products weren't configured optimally for this company. I said, "Well, this is an opportunity to look at something more cost-effective."

We landed on TitanHQ's SpamTitan.

We were using Barracuda, which is not a bad product. But we weren't set up with any portals so I couldn't see anything. We were getting an inordinate amount of spam and targeted spam. I was just unhappy with the company overall. I decided I had to put my own stuff in and just forklift everything else out.

Overall, the setup was very good. 

The exception was creating the proper certificate. We couldn't get it working properly. So SpamTitan created the certificate but it doesn't function properly because we still get an error message that people have to bypass. This is part of what I was talking about with the end-users getting a popup. It's like when you go to a webpage and the certificate is out of date. Our end-users are getting that error message because the certificate doesn't function properly. They thought the site was broken and I said, "No, you can bypass it. We trust this site. This is 'our site.'"

This issue with their certificate has caused a lot more communication between my team and the end-users where we have to say, "No, really, this is okay," because in general, we've trained them to not bypass messages like that. In this particular case, we know it's something we have to fix. That part of it wasn't clear in the documentation.

I've got a call tomorrow with the SpamTitan support team and I'll talk to them about getting this fixed because it is the only problem that we have right now.

When I talked to Barracuda from the licensing perspective, it was not as competitive as what I would have liked. We're a smaller company with about 130 employees.

Also, in a meeting with my senior management, they said that my prediction that we were going to get more spam temporarily until the SpamTitan machine learning had completed was true, but they also said they thought it was going to take much longer. Within about a week, things had settled down and they said we are getting a lot less spam than we used to with our previous solution.  

We still have SpamTitan in learning mode and one of the things that I did at the beginning was to log in every day and look at all the email. When something was obviously spam I took care of it in the back end so that end-users don't have to deal with it. This week, when I looked at it, I didn't see anything that I needed to take action on. It's doing a very good job of properly identifying things.

At first, my senior management were apprehensive about SpamTitan, but now they are saying that they feel they are in control of spam. The way SpamTitan works is a little bit different because, with Barracuda, they were getting hourly updates about quarantined mail. When I told them they were only going to get updates once a day, but they could go check, they thought that was going to be more impactful, but for most people it has resulted in less noise. Our end-users are comfortable with it and it's working really well.

In our business, we get bulk notifications from different companies about the current interest rates, sometimes two or three times a day from the same company, and they go to 20 or 30 or more recipients who are our loan officers. Our end-users like that they can go into the quarantine and clear those. After a while, they'll either create a folder for those updates or they'll just say, "I don't need this anymore and I'm going to block it." They like the fact that they're all managing that independently. That's not to say they couldn't do so with Barracuda, but it required logging into a portal and knowing how to sort things. Now, it's in an email and, right from that email, they can block or allow those  messages independently.

A few people in our organization didn't like it, but I said, "Look, you can just open this email and click a button and, within about 30 seconds, you'll have an email that says, "This is everything that's currently in quarantine." It's easier than having to use a browser, log in to a portal, and do that. That saves them a little time.

Overall, SpamTitan learned faster than I thought it was going to, based on other products that I've used. There was a lot more feedback. The other products are based on the users, but this one, with its AI, seems to produce tremendous improvements day-to-day. I told the teams it was going to take two to three weeks but, within a week, we had dropped the amount of spam that was getting through. By Tuesday of the following week, meaning about a week and a half after implementation, it was mature. It wasn't final—it's always going to be learning—but it was mature enough that we felt that the hand holding with the individuals and checking in were not things we needed to do anymore. Everybody was confident at that point.

Don't discount TitanHQ because you haven't heard of them. I sit with other CISOs.  We get together for dinner once a month and talk and I mentioned it but nobody had heard of them. I said, "SpamTitan has this and this feature," and I delved into some of the reasons we went with it and they were taking notes. They're excited to look at something recommended by a peer who is saying, "I've used multiple products and I like the way that these guys work. I like what they're doing and how we're stacking up our security." 

TitanHQ recently acquired Cyber Risk Aware for security awareness training with phishing simulation. I mentioned that it makes sense because you could tie that into your SpamTitan and WebTitan. Your training could be based upon real metrics, in real-time, based on what people are doing. That's a very good, competitive place to be. I look forward to their growth. When I mentioned those things my colleagues were saying, "Wow, this sounds like a company we need to really seriously take a look at."

My approach is to leverage things that make sense, not because they're there. I always look at: Why? Where are we going? How do we get there? Then we can decide whether that's the right type of product or service to use going forward. We have different outcomes than we would get if we did what most people do. They say, "Well, how do we improve what we've got?" Maybe what you have doesn't fit anymore.

We also use TitanHQ's WebTitan. We just rolled that out to replace Cisco Umbrella and because the interface is very similar to SpamTitan's interface, it was very easy to roll that forward and to manage it.

So far, SpamTitan is the easiest and most efficient solution I've used. I give it a 10 out of 10.

We are a solution provider and we have a lot of customers set up on our platform. This solution is used by us and our customers for email filtering.

The actual number of spam emails we get now is single digits per day. It's very little compared to the volume of email that we see coming into the spam tool. There are tens of thousands of emails per day, or even more. Using this tool brings it down to a manageable amount.

Overall, the intuitiveness of this product is pretty good.

Using SpamTitan reduced the load on our helpdesk. We do IT support, and we get help desk tickets coming in from people saying they've got emails caught or they're not getting emails from a certain sender. Instead of them emailing us their reports, they can easily unblock them themselves and allow them to go through. This eases our help desk ticket queue quite a lot, which takes a lot of pressure off of us.

Based on the number of tickets that we get each day that we no longer need to deal with, using SpamTitan saves us several hours per day.

The most valuable feature is the way it quarantines spam email.

The quarantine feature is easy to use. It has many different filters and you can easily find messages that our users are struggling to get delivered. It makes it easy to find out why it is that messages were blocked in the first place.

This product provides an email filtering report for our customers. A lot of users are set up with this report so that they can see the details themselves, before having to come to us.

SpamTitan has a geo-blocking feature and it reduces our spam intake.

The user interface contains quite a lot of information, so it can be a bit confusing when you first start to use it. It takes a bit of time to get used to, but once you know it, and with a bit of training, it's got everything you need. I can't really complain about it having too much information because it really helps out when you need it.

The interface looks a little dated and could be modernized.

I have been using TitanHQ SpamTitan since I joined the company, seven years ago. The company has been using it for at least ten years.

The stability is 100%. We've never had issues with stability.

This solution is very scalable and you can do so easily. For example, you can mass import email addresses so when we get new customers that want to use it, it's very quick and easy to set them up.

We currently have 5,000 users. At the moment, pretty much all of our clients are on it. If we get new customers then we will set them up and our usage will increase.

The technical support team normally gets back to us pretty quickly. However, they're a notch off of perfect. There are times when I would rate them a nine or ten out of ten. However, other times, they have taken a long time to get back to us. On these occasions, I would rate them a five or six out of ten.

Overall, I would rate support a seven out of ten.

Neutral

The initial setup was completed before I joined the company. I have set up some of our customers on the system and we've had no trouble with it along the way. 

The configuration is very easy and straightforward, and this is something that is very important to us. It saves us a lot of time and we never have to come back to reconfigure things or troubleshoot anything. It just works.

There are about ten of us on the help desk team that log in to use this product and maintain it. 

We have definitely seen a return on our investment from using this product. It's been very profitable because of how many users we have. It also saves us time because it frees the help desk staff to get other jobs done.

This pricing is absolutely fine and it's never been an issue of it being too expensive. We pass the costs along to our customers but it is competitively priced.

I have not used another similar solution. It has been in place since before I arrived and we've never had any need to use anything else.

Feature-wise, it's got everything that we need to do. There are no features that we consider missing. It gets top marks in this regard.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this product is to get familiar with it. It can be a little bit scary to start with, just because of how many features it has. I definitely suggest getting some training with it, if possible.

It's a good solution and when you leave it running, it deals with everything that you need to do. We trust it a lot. Overall, it's a good solution and there is not much that I can suggest they have to improve.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been using TitanHQ SpamTitan for four years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We 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.