TitanHQ SpamTitan Reviews

We are just using it for spam filtering at this point. We are open to future options, but right now, this is our biggest problem. This solution really helps mitigate the spam for us.

We have a MX record that points to them before it gets to us for emails.

We were getting hit left and right with a bunch of different spam, spoofing, etc. When we deployed SpamTitan, that immediately stopped. Of course, there were some false positives. However, I have been going through regularly, and now there have been less as we identify some that should be valid but were blocked. Once in a while, we will still get some that get let through, but we are able to update them quickly through the web interface. Therefore, it has been working really well for us. It is helping us a lot.

In the first few weeks, there were a lot more false positives that I would go through and release, then update the filter. As each week went by, it got better and better. Now, it is just here and there. There are a few, but most of them are right on. So, it has been doing really well.

In November and December, we saw a bunch of people get a phishing attack. They clicked on the link, then their computer got infected. We had to go wipe their computer and open a bunch of issues, about 10 to 12 a month from November to December. When we implemented SpamTitan, it went down to zero. It was more the false positives rather than people falling for phishing scams. It was huge as far as the difference.

We only receive emails from internal clients. Most of the stuff on the block list is from the UK and Germany. That stuff is getting blocked.

The user interface has been really good. There is an option to send people an email with what has been filtered on your stuff. Given everything else that our users do, I thought, "Let me just hold onto those keys right now, and I'll just review," because we only have 200-and-something users. So, I have been just filtering it for them. Some people report, "Hey, this guy sent me an email. I haven't heard back." I immediately go and find it, then release it. That has been working well for us.

The solution works really well. For a small nonprofit like us who don't have a large server footprint and rely heavily on cloud services, this is great for all our emails and the mobile workforce that we have. This is a great way to manage the traffic, hopefully keep our people from getting the phishing emails and stuff like that, helping to mitigate the risks.

I wish there would be less false positives. 

We have been using the solution since late November or early December 2021.

It is incredibly reliable. It has been like a rock, but it has only been a few months. It hasn't gone down or anything.

As far as scalability, it is cloud-based. It just searches all the mailboxes for the domain name. I don't have to add or reduce email boxes. It is already set up. It is really hands-off. As we grow, if you can add domains, then you just add the domains. It is really easy to grow with it. We haven't had any capacity issues.

We used the technical support once. Back in December, we used it because I had forgotten to add one of our domains, but that was really quick and easy.

We didn't use a solution like this previously.

We looked into this type of solution because of the number of people who were falling for phishing emails. I provided training to help educate them, but they were still clicking on stuff that they shouldn't have. Also, we had too many instances of having to reset laptops.

It was super easy to set up, configure, and use. They walked us through all the steps for updating our MX records, SPF records, and all the DNS stuff. 

The quick setup time was an important factor when we chose the solution because things were super busy. All the different infections were really hindering our department. So, it was huge to be able to deploy this solution so quickly with them kind of holding your hand through it. That was huge.

They walk you through every little detail, which is really helpful.

I signed up. In the first week, when we got the records, we had to wait until they were updated, then we did all the steps following their guidelines. You do one step, then you wait a week for everything to update. Then, you do the next step and start going through the false positives. So, it didn't take that long at all. It was according to their timeline. They said, "You need to wait for this to update before you do the next step." I said, "Okay," and we did just that. It worked out really well.

When someone's laptop is infected, our policy is to go and reset it to factory default. This is a huge burden on them. They have to reset all their passwords, and it is just a big problem. Therefore, it has been a huge time factor savings for our employees.

The price was great compared to other solutions that we looked at the time.

There is no appliance required for your onsite data center because it is all cloud-based. 

I evaluated several solutions over the last six months leading up to actually implementing this solution. We evaluated costs because we are very budget-sensitive. SpamTitan was our premier pick, but the cost was still too much. Then, finally in December, they just said, "We have a deal for this month only." They gave us a really good price. So, I said, "I'll go for it," because that was the one hurdle that I was facing: the cost. They just totally slashed it, and I jumped on.

It is easy to deploy, learn, and administer.

The solution is meeting all our needs right now. We don't have any big requirements though. I think it is doing a really good job.

I would rate the solution as nine out of 10. 

We use it to scan for malicious software and other threats.

The solution is in the cloud. Our emails are directed to servers that clean them by scanning for spam, viruses, et cetera. The emails are then forwarded to our email server, which we have on-premises.

What I like about SpamTitan is that it takes the stress away from us as users. We do not worry about our email. We have not had any major email threats since we have been using SpamTitan.

The solution has also helped improve our spam catch rate. Prior to SpamTitan, we were using an alternate solution that was on-premises, but we still had about 60 percent of positive, threatening emails coming through. Since we moved to SpamTitan, that figure is down to about 10 percent. That is a drastic improvement.

Another benefit is that it saves our employees time by not having to sort through junk and spam emails, because any email that is suspicious is not allowed into our environment. It's kept there on their servers. We then receive an email saying, "These are the threats that we have noticed for the day. You can go in and check through those threats and see what you think is suspicious. Once you do that, you can release that email. To me, that is a plus.

The challenge with emails is that they are one of the vulnerable aspects of any network, given that a user—one of the biggest threats to network security—can compromise all of your security because they click a link in an email. Even though our organization is small, and the number of accounts that we protect with SpamTitan is small, the value that it offers is very great.

I like the fact that we can review any email that the solution deems to be a threat, before it gets into our environment. It could be a valid email, but if at any point that email appears to be a threat, it is held and we can check it out, see if it's a legitimate email, and then release it.

Also, the user interface, in terms of usability, is rather straightforward. It's very user-friendly and easy to navigate. Any basic user who has never traversed the SpamTitan interface can understand it. We have never had any complaints from new users about difficulties in working with emails that are held.

Another feature of SpamTitan that I like is the reporting. We are able to identify the users or accounts that have been attacked most. We can see information that shows us the sites that the user goes to, and that helps in launching an investigation of that user and how they use our resources. That's a very good capability for us. If somebody has been using a machine as a bot to launch or carry malicious activities, we have been able to detect that. We have been able to prevent a couple of cases of ransomware attacks thanks to SpamTitan.

What would be helpful to me is an alert if there were an increase in the number of threats that have been picked up. In that case, an alert could be sent to the admin in our company, to inform us. It could say something like, "Generally, about 20 percent of your incoming emails have been threats. Now it has jumped up to 30 or 40 percent." Something like that would be beneficial. That way, we could check to see if it's a result of something inside our company. We could be a bit more preventative, more proactive. That would help me greatly as a network administrator.

I've been using TitanHQ SpamTitan for approximately five years.

It's difficult to give any solution a 100 percent positive rating, but thus far we have had no setbacks at all with SpamTitan. Everything that they offered has been done. They continue to do so, and have done so from the time we initiated the deployment until today.

The solution grows with our needs. We have not had any drawbacks as our requirements have grown. SpamTitan is a solution that you set up and forget, because it works that well. Even when your needs grow, it grows with you without you knowing that anything is being added to the solution. We have never had an issue with SpamTitan when it comes to scalability.

Our environment is not that big. We have about 400 to 500 email accounts, and a similar number of employees.

This year though, we plan to sit down and look at other solutions they have that may be beneficial to us.

Because it works that well, we rarely have to speak to anyone for technical assistance. The technical support for the initial setup was excellent. The customer service was excellent. During the setup, the support person was very accommodating and flexible. 

The few times that we have spoken to anyone, they were also very accommodating.

Another thing I like about SpamTitan is that they keep you abreast of the new technologies they offer, if there are any changes to your current solution, or if they're doing anything that would improve the solution. That's the most that you can ask for.

If I look at the solution that we had prior, there's no comparison between it and TitanHQ when it comes to support. With the previous solution, it would take days, sometimes, to get a response from the technical support. And with respect to other online solutions we have, there is still no comparison. TitanHQ support  is very receptive, very responsive, and very knowledgeable.

Positive

We were using Websense Content Gateway, and one of the major reasons we switched was the support. The cost was also a factor. SpamTitan gives you a lot for what you pay. You get more value on the dollar.

I did the setup and it was seamless. The only thing I had to do was diversion of the MX information for our email exchange. Everything was done within less than 15 minutes. And the propagation of the information to the DNS service took about a couple of hours.

We have seen a lot of ROI. The fact that we are working today in an environment that is full of threats, and we are still operating without any major issues, is a testament to the return on our investment. We had a lot of hits before SpamTitan, and that was one of the things that led us to seek an alternate solution to spam, malicious software, and other threats. We looked for something that was more practical and more effective, and that led us to SpamTitan.

The price is good by today's standards. You actually get what you pay for. 

The licensing agreement is rather seamless. You pay for a period and once that is up, you just renew. They give you some leeway in the payments. It's not like it's going to expire today and they're going to bombard you today saying, "Look, your contract has expired. We're going to cancel." That's a good thing as well.

We went back to Websense to evaluate them and we looked at a solution from Barracuda. For what we wanted, and the seamless nature of the operation, from our initial investigations, SpamTitan seemed to be the best. They seemed to be the best in terms of usability, scalability, and operational ability.

I would recommend SpamTitan, but it should not be the only solution you look at. You should do your own investigation. But if you do not want to do that investigation and just want a recommendation for a product, I would highly recommend SpamTitan.

We use SpamTitan as our preliminary filter for all inbound emails.

After implementing SpamTitan, we're less bothered by irrelevant spam messages and less concerned about viruses and macro-enabled files getting through because the rules are configured to stop them. It eases security headaches while improving the user experience because there's less spam. SpamTitan also reduces the administrative and security burden because it deals with threats before they can even get into our network. 

About 37 percent of our inbound email is clean, and SpamTitan blocks the remaining 63 percent. That gives some idea of how much junk it cuts out. The solution has improved our spam catch rate while reducing false positives. It has saved us substantial time and hassles sifting through that. 

I joined this company five years ago, and SpamTitan was one of the first solutions I installed. Inbound spam dropped by 95 percent. Some still get through, obviously. You have to draw a fine line because you don't want to block valid emails. Instead of locking it all the way down, we lock it down as much as possible. In the end, people have to put up with a few spam emails rather than missing valid emails that might have been blocked.

The user interface is intuitive and straightforward. All the functions are self-evident from the titles on the menus. They're crystal clear, and the in-application help is handy.

Specifying your own filtering rules can be somewhat tricky. You can leave it alone or add your own filter rules using regular expressions. It would be nice to get a little more help configuring the regular expressions. That is quite complicated, and it's something I struggled with. 

I've been using SpamTitan for about seven or eight years.

Stability has never been an issue. I've been using it for seven years in total. I've only had one problem, and that was my fault for not following the correct procedures during a system update. I opened a ticket with TitanHQ support, and they fixed it in about 30 minutes.

SpamTitan is highly scalable. You can add as many clustered servers as you require. If you find that your cluster is under a heavy load, it's simple to get SpamTitan to add other clusters to your environment. If we doubled in staff, our current solution has more than enough capacity to cope, but we're not planning on changing our usage at this time.  

We have roughly 250 users, including everybody from the CEO to warehouse workers. They don't use the program directly, but they benefit from having their email filtered. 

TitanHQ support is absolutely brilliant, a perfect 10 out of 10. In addition to SpamTitan, we also use WebTitan, their cloud-based web filtering solution. I've had to contact support maybe two or three times in the past five years. On each occasion, communication and rectification of the issue have been outstanding. They're on it.

Positive

I have used other products, but it's been a while. We previously used Mimecast, and it was also an excellent solution but considerably more expensive. Both solutions are stable and have great support. 

Setting up SpamTitan is effortless. We got TitanHQ to set up a private cloud for us. Once the server was live, it was just a matter of reconfiguring my DNS MX records to route all inbound emails through SpamTitan. After that, I configured SpamTitan to route inbound emails to our Office 365 environment. It literally took me 20 minutes to get it running.

We had zero problems setting up and configuring SpamTitan. We didn't need to contact support. It runs out of the box. You only need to do some configuration to customize it for your use case. Total deployment time was about three to four weeks from the initial purchase order to going live. 

After the setup, one person is more than enough to maintain SpamTitan. We don't have a dedicated person for the solution because it needs little input. Once it's set up, it just runs. It's a fantastic product.

I did the installation myself because I've used it before. We purchased it directly through TitanHQ. The initial setup was perfectly straightforward, and I did the fine tweaking myself over a period of time.

We've seen a 95 percent reduction in inbound spam and an equivalent reduction in inbound, malicious, phishing emails, and virus emails. You can't get a better return on investment than improving your security.

I rate SpamTitan 10 out of 10. It's a great option if you are looking for an efficient, reliable, easy-to-use email filtering solution that doesn't require onsite IT people to maintain. You don't need a technical understanding of email protocols and security to use it.

My advice is to look at the pros and cons of all the email filtering solutions and pick one that best fits your budget and security requirements. I can't say that SpamTitan is the right solution for everybody, but it's certainly perfect for us. I'm extremely happy with it and have been for years. It does what it says on the tin. SpamTitan is reasonably priced, and TitanHQ 's tech support is excellent. I can't speak highly enough of those guys.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've used the solution for about ten years. 

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

We did have some assistance from technical support.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 an IT consulting company. We use SpamTitan for clients, that prefer an on-premise option instead of the cloud. Due to strict requirements and security concerns using the cloud is prohibited so they need to protect their servers in-house email servers.

We always use a multi-tiered approach when it comes to designing and securing our clients email environments and SpamTitan is one of the products that we use. When email comes in, it is first scanned at the firewall, then it is passed onto SpamTitan. SpamTitan checks it again and then forwards it to the email server.

For the past four years, this solution is working well and our clients are satisfied with our approach.

Spam and viruses have gone down to almost zero it works very well for that reason, it is also very simple to use and supports clustering. Clustering is a major benefit because it eliminates single points of failures. If one of the gateways fails the other takes over without any disruption.

Very effective in blocking spam and viruses and can be deployed as an appliance. SpamTitan supports clustering thus eliminating single points of failure. The geo-blocking feature is good to have, to protect against offending countries and the user interface is clean and very simple to use and works quite well. Customized report generation is excellent and the product is very easy to maintain.

They need to keep up with the latest technology and add new features as they arise, e.g., artificial intelligence, new and improved updated lists, or new ways of tracking spam. They need to just keep up so the product is effective. Because, if all of a sudden viruses or spam starts getting through, then we might have to look at something else. However, so far, it has kept up and done a great job. So, we are happy.

I have been using it for about four years.

We make sure all the updates get updated and tested. Other than that, the maintenance is minimal. It does most of the work for us.

For the past four years, it has been rock solid. There have been absolutely no issues with it.

Its ability to integrate with other systems has been great. On the back end, my client uses Exchange so that hasn't been an issue. On the front end, with the firewall, it also hasn't been an issue. It is very transparent in how it works. The information gets passed to it, then it does its job and passes it to the next node, i.e., email. The other way around, it also does the same thing. So, it works quite well with other third-party products. There are no integration issues.

They are a smaller company, so it was more difficult to get a hold of them. However, once that relationship was established, because of their smaller size, they are willing to work more with resellers. Therefore, it has been a good relationship since then.

We have never had to use the tech support since the solution has been rock-solid. We have been very happy with it. There is a feature from within the GUI where you can directly contact them, then they can take a look at your configuration or try to solve the issue. That is a good feature to have, but we haven't had the need to use it. 

Positive

In the past, our client had a lot of problems with spam on their emails. Therefore, we implemented a multi-tiered approach.

This solution replaced another product from Symantec that was being phased out by our client. SpamTitan was very easy to set up. It took some time integrated with some of the other backend systems but once the tweaking and fine tuning phase was completed everything worked well without any problems. Now, it is almost set it and forget it. There is just basic maintenance and monitoring going forward.

Implementation was done in-house.

SpamTitan has helped tremendously by saving employees’ time, not having to sort through junk and spam emails. Clients are very happy with the product. It solves their problem. In the morning, the IT administrator checks out a quick report that he runs every night. He then makes sure everything is working fine, and that is it. So, it does not take a lot of time for him to monitor and administer it. It is set it and forget it because it does its job.

The pricing model was one of the reasons that we selected it. The solution was very effective at what it did and it was very cost-effective. My client saved in the 30% to 40% range by installing it, so the pricing is competitive.

We evaluated different products. During the evaluation phase, this was one of the best products out there. We made the recommendation to our client, installed it, and they have been very happy ever since.

I would rate it as a solid eight out of 10 because there is always room for improvement. However, the solution has been solid.