TitanHQ SpamTitan Reviews

We use it for domain spam filtering. You put the original MX records on their server and the mail goes to them and then back to you, clean.

One way that TitanHQ positions me, as a reseller, to acquire new business is that what they have is comprehensive. It's not any one thing that does it. It's a conglomeration of product offerings. The group of products that we can offer makes us look better because we're offering a comprehensive suite of solutions.

Every client that uses it experiences a productivity boost. If somebody has to filter through 150 or 200 emails a day to find the 30 good ones, that's inefficient. If they're using SpamTitan it's making them more efficient because they don't have to go through all the junk.

SpamTitan helps improve your spam catch-rate and reduce your false-positive rate. It depends on the domain, but in general it blocks spam email which amounts to about 60-plus percent of the email that people receive. It makes them that much more efficient.

The user interface and user experience of SpamTitan are very good. It's easy to use and very intuitive. No end-user is going to buy the product. A company or a reseller is going to buy it for them. As one of those resellers, I know that our users get a daily report and they can un-quarantine something, or block it in the future.

They could improve on the color of the interface.

I've been using TitanHQ SpamTitan for four or five years.

I pay them a flat price for space on a shared server and I can then set up unlimited domains and up to 200 email addresses.

The stability is extremely high.

It's an all-in solution. We have it across five domains and there are about 175 users.

The biggest benefit of being a partner of TitanHQ is the technical support. It's good, quality support. Any product can say it is as good as it wants, but without support, no product is useful.

Their support is well above average. They are way better than the average tech support you get from other companies.

Positive

I used to use a different product and I was pretty happy with it, but then it had a technology fallout and it disappeared off the planet. We couldn't get to our system. Their phones were out for a month and the service was down for a month and we just had to get away from them.

I had Googled SpamTitan, from the TitanHQ line of products, and had gotten very good feedback about them. I decided to give them a try because I needed a new solution. The service worked and the tech support is great.

The setup is another area where we go back to the support they provide. Their support department holds your hand and helps you get through the process. I did four or five domains over a couple of hours on a weekend.

It's pretty simple, just a matter of making sure you have control of the DNS and updating the MX records.

It just takes one person for deployment and maintenance.

The biggest lesson I've learned from using the solution is that there are a lot of nasty emails out there.

We primarily use this product to filter spam and other unwanted emails as well as protect our users from malicious links.

We have an enterprise environment. We opted to use an on-premises version installed on a VM that runs the SpamTitan software.

Optionally, we could have implemented the web version. However, given that we wanted it on-premises and it was cheaper in our case.

SpamTitan will be included in any substantial infrastructure changes going forward due to the easy fit and value provided. 

SpamTitan has improved our organization because it does a better job at filtering spam from getting in, along with the many phishing attempts. Be it widespread or just spearphishing, it recognizes and quarantines them.

Link Lock is a big deal because we were having people click on stuff and just go anywhere, and it has solved all of that.

Using this solution has saved our general user time by not having to sort through junk mail. This is not the case for me, however, because I have to go in and filter the mail, but that's why the product was created.

From the everyday user standpoint, it's great because it stops all of the spam, all of the flyers, all of the advertising, and anything we don't want going into the system. It works great for that purpose.

The most valuable feature is the Link Lock, which prevents our users from clicking on links that haven't been verified. This is the feature that sold us on the product. We already had an anti-spam engine, but it didn't have that feature, and SpamTitan is what solved that problem for us.

The interface is easy to learn and easy to use, even for beginners that know nothing about the product. One can just pick it up and go.

The sensitivity of the setup that determines what's spam and what isn't, including the scoring in order to quarantine, block, or allow emails, is well done.

When in the control panel, the context menu that appears when you right-click on an email should present options for adding the sender to the whitelist or blocking them. If we installed the Outlook plugin for our users then it could be done using that. However, we don't install that plugin because it will complicate their lives. Using a context-menu selection should be as effective as going in to manually add it.

As it is now, I have to have three different tabs open with the control panel. One is the dashboard, another is watching quarantine, and there is a third one for adding people to either the allow or block lists. Having the ability to right-click and bring up a context menu would be the best answer in that case.

I have been using TitanHQ SpamTitan for nearly one year.

Stability-wise, it's great. This is a product that works. It does what it says it's going to do and it does it well. We don't have any issues with it at all.

Scalability is just a matter of the license. We're licensed for perhaps 250 email accounts and we're not hitting that yet. We have approximately 170, so it will scale just fine.

If we hit that cap, then it'll be seamless. They'll just issue us a new license, we'll pay a little more money, and we'll be fine.

The technical support team is quick to answer and they're very helpful. As soon as you learn their procedures, it's very simple and very straightforward.

I would rate the support a nine out of ten. We're pretty happy with it but nobody is a ten.

Positive

Prior to this solution, we were using GFI Mail Essentials.

When we were speaking with a representative, this person had not had much interaction with GFI. He suggested that SpamTitan is an up-to-date and modern solution, which is what caused me to look into it.

It's more cost-effective, and it has the Link Lock feature, so that's the direction that we went in. In fact, we signed on to use the product several months before the Link Lock feature was released.

Another difference with SpamTitan is that it's simpler to use. It's much easier to move around in the interface without having to expand menu after menu. It was very cluttered and cumbersome to use GFI.

The service and customer support that I receive from SpamTitan are excellent.

The initial setup is straightforward.

It was important to us that the solution was simple and straightforward to set up. We did have to create a VM, but they gave us guidelines for that. Everything was there and it was simple to do.

Had it not been straightforward then I would have had support available to help me. I didn't need support for the initial setup but they did assist us during the configuration. There were some very specific filters that we wanted in place, which is really just customization for our environment.

I was responsible for implementing the system. I searched out the product, spoke with the rep, made the deal, installed it, set it up, and configured it. There were no other staff involved in the deployment.

We get everything straight from SpamTitan headquarters in Ireland.

Our return on investment comes from not having to spend hours cleaning out the mail server, including all of the spam that used to be going to people. With all of the flyers and advertisements that come via email, we were constantly adding to the block list. Now, we no longer have to do that. Users have to spend less time managing their Inboxes.

Price-wise, this product is very compatible with our budget.

Beyond comparing it to GFI, we did evaluate other options but SpamTitan fit every need. We had some knowledge of Barracuda; the spam engine worked well but it was too expensive. This is something that we considered, but nobody could deal with Link Locks. As such, we didn't want to go elsewhere.

SpamTitan has a geo-blocking feature but we don't have a call to use it.

This is a product that I recommend. They really take care of everything and there's nothing that you need. We're quite happy with it and if service and support are important to you, they're right there on top of it.

They don't just sell you something and let you fend for yourself with a "do it yourself" guide. They do have that option, and it's very detailed and well done, but they will deal with you one on one and help you to resolve anything that you want. They will answer any of your questions and help you to configure the system.

In summary, there are several features that I like and it works well.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

It is an effective email filter, however, it's increased over time since they have new features that expand the offering. We use it for more security-based uses. 

We are able to report on various different odds and ends as we see some increase in spam. We do so using the base and logic that's built into it and it is helpful. It allows us to use some deep learning features to proactively block spam. It's really been one of the most effective spam filters that I've worked with for an on-premises solution.

The Link Lock feature with SpamTitan Plus has been great. We're all pretty familiar with the technology. That said, as we work throughout our day, we're moving fast and people won't always spend the time to diagnose potential danger before they click. This is why that feature alone saved us tremendously.

There are a couple of incidents where we had to do triage when somebody clicked on a link. The Link Lock feature prevents anything bad from happening. It stops it right at the gate. It gets people to actively think and also helps us train our staff. We get reports of, "oh, you know this, why am I seeing this prompt?" It naturally puts that little bit of a mental block in between the process, and that alone is tremendous. It's overwhelmingly beneficial just as a general-purpose mail filter. We saw benefits from it immediately.

We typically won't roll out a new product to all users. We did some initial testing, rolled it out to some of the staff, and eventually rolled it out to all the staff. It's still highly beneficial.

SpamTitan Plus is another feature that we use, but it's primarily an email filter or email security facilitating appliance.

The features that we're finding to be most valuable are mostly those that leverage the quarantine and some of the reporting functions. We like all the blacklist details and the day-to-day reports that it generates for spam and users. All of that is highly tunable, which is much appreciated.

The new SpamTitan Plus with the Link Lock feature is great. We implemented it and use it as well.

We use SpamTitan's geo-blocking feature. It allows us to block spam emails that enter our network and servers and reduces our spam intake. Some of those features are also fantastic as they enable us to report on, for example, who's the most active spam relays. We can see all IPs when going into the console. We've integrated a process where we review SpamTitan and then add those kinds of details in order to block both efforts. If a user has any issues, I can use the reporting feature and see what is being blocked through geo-blocking or what is being blocked by our firewall appliance.

It saves us time. All of our changes are really pretty quick. As far as time-saving goes, if I compare it to a previous solution like Postini, which is an old Google product that was very similar, SpamTitan is easier to navigate. When I started to use SpamTitan, I discovered that it was actually much easier to administer than Postini, which helped save admin time.

In terms of geo-blocking, most of the reporting functionality is baked into SpamTitan, it relays all those details and shows us what IPs are relaying spam. We go through a process where we start wide, and we don't open up a lot due to the geo IP blocking. It can be really dangerous if we don't use that sparingly. By looking at the reports that SpamTitan generates, we can go and add those details to the geo-blocking feature and make some decisions based on that. This is mission-critical. It's the first line of defense. Email is something that every organization leaves exposed to the internet and it's constantly being attacked. Email is where the number one cause of phishing scams originate which is why it's 110% mission-critical.

SpamTitan helped save employees time by not having them sort through junk and spam emails. Being able to create that and have it generate the quarantine reports, keeps everything consolidated. I can dial it in to what I like. If I want to go extreme or want to go light, it gives me those options.

Quite a bit of time was previously spent sorting through unwanted junk. That was one of the biggest complaints. When I started to dig into it, I was pretty amazed at how quickly I was able to rectify just going through the console. It has options too for being able to go and administer user accounts, so as an admin, I can go through and make decisions and choices before the user even sees it. Typically, we require that people check their quarantine at least once or twice a day. As an admin, I may go through and see what is happening before the end-user notices it. With one person we can tackle that task versus everyone in the company having to do it individually, which compounds exponentially.

The spam catch rate and false positives before versus after implementation were night and day. When I first started it, they hadn't done a lot of the tuning. Then, once I started to ratchet down the tuning it changed overnight. At that point, I was getting compliments from the staff.

They really just need to continue to roll out new features. They constantly develop this product. We get updates at least once a quarter and sometimes multiple times per quarter. We investigate new trends for spam relays or malware, and the SpamTitan team constantly adds new features to it to address what we find. They constantly improve what they've got, which we appreciate and we hope they continue to do.

They can increase some of the reporting around user logins. In order for us to make that determination, we have to pull down reports. They could make it a bit easier.

The finesse of the reporting could probably be improved. Being able to filter and generate reports and being able to ship those reports to different users would be ideal. It's got some of those features built-in, however, increasing some of that could be beneficial. For the work that we do and with the way we administer it, oftentimes we have to pull down logs and rig through the logs to find out what happened. Maybe some additional reporting as to why it flagged spam would be useful and the reasoning behind why it actually flagged email X. Or, if we get a false positive, then explain why. Right now, we do a manual process where we go through the logs. If they increase the level of reporting, we’d pretty much have a perfect product.

I've been using this solution for about six to seven years. It was implemented before I started with the company.

The stability is great. I've never had a problem with it.

I had problems with Postini on a couple of different occasions, however, it was also an off-premises solution too. I also had my WAN that's involved in that connection and Google's far-end servers. With this solution running on-premises, I forget what they run an OS on it. However, it's a Unix-like operating system that runs well, it will process updates, and we've never had an issue with an update. It just keeps going.

In terms of scalability, I've never really investigated it as we really didn't have much of a need to. I do know that it's got high availability features and it's pretty easy to set up. It's also got an API call that you can implement with it too. If you wanted to manage it with some other kind of NMS or something like that, you can, as it has those capabilities. We don't particularly have a need for it. There's less of an attack vector.

SpamTitan's support is amazing. They answer any questions you have 24/7. The way they can connect remotely to help diagnose problems is great. I've never had a bad experience with their support team.

I can't think of another vendor that I work with that has better support than SpamTitan. They either give me a solution, give a workaround, or explain what's going on nearly immediately.

Positive

The last solution I used was Postini before Google retired it. That was almost a decade ago. I don't think Postini is still around anymore.

I didn't necessarily make the switch, it was already in production. I'm not really interested in another product. Purely from a support standpoint alone, in a world where customer support is all but dead, SpamTitan consistently delivers.

I was not involved in the initial setup, however, when they deployed it, it was very light. They didn't take advantage of a lot of the features and it's got a very deep feature set too.

Some of my support engagements are purely just asking questions, however, they never give me a whole look at the manual or pawn me off. They answer the question almost immediately.

In terms of the environment we have, it pretty much sits at the gate for all of our inbound emails and it's used for the entire company. If you categorize this into a smaller to medium business category, it handles less than 50 users. 

Other than standard updates, this solution doesn't require any maintenance. We have five or so people who can handle the maintenance aspect. They are there mostly to maintain the quarantine, watch, regulate the product, and continue to tune it over time.

The ROI from a SpamTitan license is pretty good.

It pays for itself. If it mitigated one event then it's paid for itself. These days, if ransomware gets into your network and takes over, you can have a really, really hard time. The cost per the ROI on it is tremendous for sure.

The solution is very affordable. 

I didn't look into other options. I really didn't feel like there was a need to.

We have it on a single server on-premises. It's the latest release. 

We do not use ArcTitan or EncryptTitan. We have other solutions that we work with for those use cases. I would use them if we didn't already have that kind of other processes that we look at. We just don't have a business need for it.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten. I recommend it to anyone that's looking for a solution like this. I'd advise potential users to just buy it and figure it out and they'll be there to help you. Their support is excellent. I cannot say enough good things about them. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We probably have been using this solution since 2014.

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The quarantine report is easy to navigate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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

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

Overall, the intuitiveness of this product is pretty good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The interface looks a little dated and could be modernized.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neutral

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.