TitanHQ SpamTitan Reviews

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

Their pricing is really good for what it does.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Five or six of us who use Office 365 depend on it as our spam filter.  All Remote workers.

I'm pretty sure that SpamTitan has improved our spam catch rate, but we weren't previously monitoring that. Our IT company did so. But I certainly get fewer people coming to me now and saying, "There's a problem here. What's going on spam-wise?" than I used to have with the IT company that was responsible for our email. With our previous solution, not enough spam was being caught.

We know that SpamTitan is doing a reasonable job. We see the things it's catching and the things it's catching are the things you'd want it to, in general. Overall, it is doing exactly what it says on the box, which is exactly what we wanted it to do in terms of separating out stuff. We don't get many false positives at all.

We really like the fact that we get a quarantine report because we can identify for ourselves which emails we want to keep and which we want to get rid of. It also gives us the option of directly allowing emails, which we really like. That way, the next time we get such emails, they're not blocked.

The user interface experience with SpamTitan is great. On a scale of one to 10, I'd give it an eight or nine because it is very straightforward. Overall, the solution is intuitive, particularly for my end users. I'm the one who implemented it, but my end-users find the reports very easy to use when they want to delete or block somebody. We're impressed.

There was a situation in which I needed to change the cloud server. From SpamTitan, I had to specify which server we were on for the integration into Office 365 and I actually only found that out because there was a problem. It would have been better if they had advised us of that first.

I've been using TitanHQ SpamTitan for about two years.

Overall it is very stable. There haven't been any problems with downtime at all.

There have been one or two occasions where I have wondered about that, situations where I've had to try to ascertain whether it's Office 365 or SpamTitan that was the issue, when an email seemed to have gotten lost somewhere along the way. And mostly, it's been Office 365 where the issues were found, not with SpamTitan.

Totally scalable - although we're unlikely to need it to be.

The tech support has been very good. We've not needed to use it very much, but when we have they have come back to us pretty quickly. In general, they have found the issue. Tech support have been very easy to deal with.

Compared to similar solutions I would definitely put SpamTitan's tech support up there. There have been a couple of instances where we've really had to drill down into what the problem was, and they've done what they could to find it. Because we're dealing with Office 365 and SpamTitan, there are times when it's not clear where the conflict is. TitanHQ have been very good at doing their best to help us with that.

Positive

The Email Laundry is what we were using previously, through an external IT  company. What made us switch was the fact that we decided to take IT in-house. The Email Laundry were not willing to deal with us if we weren't a partner.

It was very easy to set up. I did that in conjunction with their customer support initially. If we had had a lot of choices, the ease of the setup would have been a factor in our decision to go with SpamTitan. While I advise on IT, I'm a non-technical IT advisor, so that matters a lot. It matters that what we're looking at is easy to understand.

The deployment took a matter of hours. 

in house.

The cost is reasonable for what we're using. The product is worth it and is certainly solving a problem that we would have if we didn't have it. 

There is something that TitanHQ have come out with recently, which is an upgrade to the next level up. It's some type of real-time blocking. That is out of our reach financially. But what we're using currently is at about the level that we can afford as a not-for-profit organization.

I had to do quite a bit of research into the options available to get the level of spam filtering we needed, given that we're a very small company. The fact that TitanHQ gave us a trial is what enabled us to move forward with it.

As a result of my research, there weren't any other companies on my list. We had to eliminate most of them for the same reason as The Email Laundry, that they weren't willing to deal with a small company.

And SpamTitan is much better because it's more user-friendly. With The Email Laundry, we didn't necessarily get the quarantine reports in quite the way that we do with SpamTitan. And when they did come through, we spent a lot of time trying to work out where the problem was. With SpamTitan, we're going straight to them to get the answer and they're pretty quick at answering.

We don't currently use the geo-blocking feature, but we might. We've got a bigger-picture issue going on due to the fact that we've become a completely remote office, so that might well come into play.

We still do have to look at spam emails because there's an awful lot of junk that comes to SpamTitan, and we have to decide whether or not we want it. But because it's all in the solution's quarantine report, rather than in our inboxes, the spam is in its own space where it can be looked at.

I would definitely recommend it, particularly in our scenario where we're not a large corporation with a whole IT department. It's a good product and I think it's definitely solving an issue that we would have if we didn't have this solution.

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

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

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

The most valuable features are the 

• reporting
• overall filtering functionality

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

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

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

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

I have been using TitanHQ SpamTitan for two years.

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

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

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

We haven't really engaged their technical support.

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.