TitanHQ SpamTitan Reviews

It's the only product we use for filtering spam and viruses, et cetera.

The fact that it blocks most of the spam—and about 75 percent of all emails coming in is spam—is a great help. We still have some spam emails that pass through because they are more and more complex, but when we need help to configure the solution, TitanHQ is always there to help with an issue that we may have.

It definitely helps save employees' time. Having to sort through junk email was becoming a problem. Most of our users rarely get spam now. We also don't have to worry about them deleting something that is valid because. When you have too much junk, you may also delete stuff that is not junk.

The spam filtering is the most valuable part. When we first started using it, 15 years ago, there weren't many solutions that worked well, were user-friendly, and powerful.

We do have a few users, like the president of our organization, whose email address is everywhere, who still get some spam and we can't really block it because it's always coming from different addresses.

Also, it's a bit complex, but if you want a lot of features, it has to be kind of complex, and they have good support. When you can't find something, they help you to find it.

SpamTitan doesn't allow you to customize the time reports are sent. Sometimes our users would prefer that it come at a certain time, like 7:00 am so they can make sure they didn't miss anything from the day before. Currently, it can come in the middle of the day and probably depends on the server's restart or the setting change.

I have been using SpamTitan for at least 15 years.

The stability is very good. We have never had any issues with its stability.

We used previous solutions a long time ago, but the stability of SpamTitan versus them is better because, now, everything is virtual. At that time, most solutions were on-premises, but SpamTitan had the virtual appliance from the beginning, so it was better. Getting email is one of the most important things for our company.

The scalability is very good too. You just need licenses for the number of users that you have.

I have contacted their technical support several times. They're very good.

I don't have a competing solution, but their support is very good compared to the support we get for other products, who have their support based in India. It's definitely better. They always know what they're talking about and they provide a quick response. Even if it's something that you are doing wrong, they don't just try to close the case, they try to resolve your issue.

We used a free product and we also used a Norton product for some time, but it wasn't working as well as SpamTitan does. It was a consultant who worked for us who told me about the product and I tried it and it was definitely better than all the other ones that we tried before.

SpamTitan delivered performance and the price was quite good. I haven't compared it recently, and the price has increased in recent years, but the price and performance, at the time, were the key factors.

The initial deployment was pretty easy. The fact that it's easy to install was only of average importance when deciding to use the solution. I do everything regarding IT in our organization. If it's complex, it's still only going to be installed once, and then you just update it. There isn't much maintenance or involvement with it and we don't need a lot of people to know the solution.

I did it myself.

For the service, the pricing is reasonable.

We don't use other solutions so we can't really compare.

The encryption feature seems to be the most useful. We didn't have a convenient option for it previously, and having the capability to encrypt from within the message nearly seamlessly is a benefit to us.

EncryptTitan's Keyword Policy Based Encryption feature is one of the features we were looking for. We wanted a simple process for our end users so that they could encrypt emails and attachments. The other option we had before used multiple steps in order to achieve the same result.

With SpamTitan, the false positives and false negatives seem to be higher than those with the product we had previously.

The other area for improvement has to do with how to deal with false positives. If something slips through, there's no easy way to mark it as spam globally. The add-in has not been working. We haven't even deployed it to our entire organization yet because it's not working for the few in the pilot project.

We've been using SpamTitan for almost a year now.

Stability-wise, it's pretty consistent. It has not gone down, although we had to have the instance restarted once. The stability of our previous email security solution was about the same as that of SpamTitan.

I'm not happy with the technical support. Issues seem to drag on longer than they should, and we have no direct phone contact with support staff. Everything is handled through email, which is not really efficient in some situations and prevents the problem from being resolved faster.

In comparison, the technical support from AppRiver was much faster in terms of service responses. The products that we had before AppRiver were from GFI MailEssentials, and they were very responsive and had phone support so that we could directly talk to someone.

Overall, I would rate technical support at five on a scale from one to ten.

Neutral

We previously used AppRiver. The primary reasons we chose SpamTitan are that it was a more modern product and that it offered encryption. On paper, it also looked like SpamTitan had more features than AppRiver.

SpamTitan built a solution for us and tested it out, and it seemed to work fine. That's why we went with it.

The level of complexity of the initial setup was not beyond what we expected because we were deploying a lot of options. We had good support, and it was not difficult to set up and configure SpamTitan. We definitely wanted to be able to deploy the solution as quickly as possible.

We have one person assigned to handle the maintenance of the solution.

SpamTitan is deployed organization-wide. We're very regional, so we don't have other entities outside of our location.

We worked directly with SpamTitan. I did the backend configuration, integrating it with our Office 365 tenant, and my colleague was responsible for the Outlook plugin, which is still an issue.

Encryption has definitely filled a gap that we needed, and it's a return on investment. 

The pricing was a little bit below the average of what we were looking at.

We evaluated Proofpoint, Barracuda, Trustify, and Kaseya. We chose to go with SpamTitan because of the encryption option and the supposed modern email security options.

If you are evaluating SpamTitan, I would advise you to take a look at the service options for problem resolution.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate SpamTitan a seven.

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.

Almost all of our email spam filtration goes through SpamTitan.

Most, if not all of our customers, benefit from SpamTitan because of the way it eliminates really dangerous spam. It is called “vaporizing.” It will vaporize bad and very dangerous spam so that our customers never even see it and there's never a chance for them to click on something that could potentially be dangerous or hazardous to their networks. It's a very nice security feature for us. People are still mostly the problem when it comes to becoming exposed to network vulnerabilities and SpamTitan takes some of that responsibility away from them.

When it comes to our organization, as an MSP, I have a handful of techs who work with me and, because the interface is so intuitive and simple, it has made training them very easy and quick. In addition, because TitanHQ’s support is so fluid with their own product, they're able to get us the answers we need and we're then able to implement fixes for customers.

Out of the gate, it takes a little fine-tuning to get the numbers right, but it definitely saves time for our customers’ employees because they don’t have to sort through junk and spam emails.

The big aspect of TitanHQ’s technology, when it comes to acquiring new customers for us as an MSP, is the way it sandboxes all incoming email attachments. That feature allows an email attachment to be run as if somebody had opened it, without causing any threat or concern to our customers' environments. The solution can open the attachment, run through it, and make sure there's nothing malicious about it. If there is something malicious, it destroys it. If there isn't, it passes it on. 

On average, it does that in less than a second and that means a customer never feels that something is scanning their attachments. Nobody is going to notice a one-second lag in email delivery. It provides a lot of security and peace of mind for us, but it doesn't bother or interrupt a customer’s day-to-day functions.

The customer-facing panel, what the customers actually log in to, is where they can release spam email, or allow and block email addresses or domains, was also a big selling point for us. We like how customer-friendly the interface is.

We have submitted requests for a feature which would be a total control panel. It would have a footer at the bottom of every email and list things like

• the original source of the email
• what its spam score was when it passed through the system
• original or source IP's
• other, more technical information.

Our previous spam filter had that type of feature and it saved us from having to log in to the panel online, search for an email, pull it up, and figure out where it came from originally and why it got the spam score it did. That would be a huge improvement and time-saver because then we wouldn't have to log into the web portal for that. It would be at the foot of every single email that passes through the system.

We have been using TitanHQ SpamTitan since January of 2022, so about six months.

We have it deployed across about 20 different Microsoft 365 environments, using Exchange Online, with about 600 mailboxes in total. We run it in our office and that is also Microsoft 365.

It has been stable. We had one update, in April. Other than that, it has been completely stable. We can log in to the panel and see the uptime. It's only been restarted once, after that update, and otherwise, it has been up 100 percent of the time.

Scaling it is very easy. It's just a matter of submitting a support ticket to increase the overall number of mailboxes we're paying for, and then we just keep moving forward.

We plan to increase our usage of SpamTitan. We have five customers still in Reflexion and they will be moving over in the next two months. At that point, we'll be 100 percent SpamTitan.

The biggest benefit of being a partner of TitanHQ is the support. Every account manager seems to go above and beyond to ensure that we have the information we need and that we have it in a timely fashion. That goes for every support ticket and interaction we've had with them as well. In addition, they're just genuinely a friendly group of people to work with.

Account and customer support stand out for us as an MSP because we interface with them a lot.

We used Reflexion. We switched because it was bought out by another company that decided to sunset the product. It hasn't had any major updates in quite some time and it was beginning to be a security hazard.

Reflexion was a stable product. Where it fell short was with updates in security. It ran and was always there, but it was falling behind.

Our initial deployment was a piece of cake. We did it on the phone with SpamTitan in about 12 minutes. It was phenomenal. I had another technician, on our side, involved in that phone call.

The product, in general, is very easy to implement and it's very effective. It doesn't require any babysitting or hand holding. You just tie it to the platform you're using for email and it goes to work. You do a little bit of fine-tuning based on feedback from the customers. Then, it's just a matter of checking on it occasionally.

We've got it down pat now. We make the necessary DNS changes, build the customer information in the new SpamTitan panel, and schedule a cutover with the customer. We cut over the MX and DNS records and usually, within minutes, email is flowing through SpamTitan successfully. From there, it's just a matter of working with the customer, usually for a couple of days, to help fine-tune the spam score so that stuff that shouldn't get caught gets through and stuff that should be caught is stopped.

In terms of maintenance, SpamTitan support sends us an email to let us know when there is an update. We schedule downtime, log in to the panel, and do the update. The entire thing takes less than 30 minutes.

For us, the ROI is the time we get back from not having to babysit the solution or have people trying to figure it out. And for our customers, it's a time-saver because it's very easy and intuitive to use. It's quick.

The pricing is very fair. We've been very happy with it. You just pay the bundle fee for a group of mailboxes.

We tried three other options before we settled on SpamTitan.

First and foremost, we went with SpamTitan because of the ease of use inside the web panel. What our customers have to see when they click on something is a factor we take very seriously, and the customer-facing panels from the other contenders were just terrible. SpamTitan has that all figured out, cleaned up, and it presents very well. When a customer who's not techy clicks on the link and needs to release or block an email, it makes it very simple and clean for them.

Customer support from TitanHQ has been top-tier, top-notch, the whole time we have worked with them, they have been on it. As for the others that we demoed, while they did respond, it didn't feel like they were as comfortable with their own products as SpamTitan’s techs are with theirs.

We haven't had any conversations about things that need to be improved in the solution. Nobody has any major complaints. For the time being, it's a pretty solid solution out-of-the-box and we're not looking for any immediate changes.

Just try it. Install it, run it, and try it. It’s incredibly simple to use, it sets up in minutes, and there are wonderful account and support teams. Just do it. Just use it and the product will sell itself.

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.

SpamTitan is our primary defense for email against spam and viruses.

We have it running on a virtual machine image that they gave us. It is hosted in our data center.

We have noticed a trend of approximately 5% growth in spam per year, versus legitimate email, and SpamTitan seems to catch almost all of it.

Using SpamTitan saves us a ton of time. We have users that get literally thousands of junk emails a day. The longer you are at an organization, the more spam you seem to accumulate, and it seems mostly the owner specifically. In our scenario, they went from getting like two or three thousand junk emails a day, to now just two reports a day. They don't have to go through each email to filter what's actual work and what's just junk.

We had some users that were spending two or three hours going through email. There is a huge difference for some people, although it depends on the user. Some people do not use email often so it's not really beneficial for them. For the people that spend a lot of time sending and receiving email, it's saved quite a bit of time. It is upwards of hours in a day. Also, it saves me a ton of time because it prevents them from clicking the wrong thing.

Twice a day, it sends a report of what it has caught. I haven't actually looked at the report in perhaps two years because the accuracy for my inbox was always dead on. At the same time, however, we have a lot of users that check the report all the time. One reason is that they may have a new client that is accidentally classified as spam, or they receive a legitimate email that contains a lot of spam keywords. One of our clients is a large equipment manufacturer and they send legitimate emails with marketing taglines that sometimes get flagged as spam. For the most part, we have very few false positives.

SpamTitan is good at catching zero-day viruses and spam messages.

One feature that helped us a lot in the past year is the Link Lock. It will check the URLs that are included in messages and if they're not trusted sites then the link will be blocked.  For example, our users will receive an email that says something to the effect of "Your password is about to expire, so please click on the enclosed link." If they click on the link, it causes a huge headache for us. Now, it's automatically blocked, which saves us a ton of time.

The Link Lock feature will check every URL in your email against a database of legitimate URLs. A malicious URL might go to a phishing site or a hacker site but if it isn't in the list of valid URLs, it will respond with a message that says "Blocked by SpamTitan Link Lock". It re-writes the URL so that it goes through their server, rather than the URL itself.

We just recently turned on the geo-blocking feature to block emails from Russia and Ukraine. We don't monitor the email that is blocked, unless it comes under the "relay denied" classification. That is approximately 2% of our total intake.

We use the whitelist feature to allow exemptions based on trusted senders. This is an important feature because we have approximately 12 sub-companies, and there is a good deal of marketing material sent between people. We configure them as trusted senders so that the messages don't get classified as spam, due to a large amount of marketing material. The whitelist allows them to communicate with each other and not get filtered out.

The user interface is great. Everything is in the browser; it is easy to set up and there are not a lot of tabs.

Most of it is simple to use and the side that the user sees is pretty intuitive. That said, there are grades of difficulty based on user experience.

When an email is quarantined, there are a couple of different search filters to help find what you're looking for. Having more choices would be helpful because as it is now, we can search for inbound or outbound, the score, the subject, and the email address. I would like to see a filter for searching inside the message content when it is quarantined.

I have been using TitanHQ SpamTitan for approximately seven years.

This is a stable product. Our current uptime is 412 days. It was offline at the time because we had an outage in our data center. We had something plugged in wrong, so the fault was on our side.

Our service from them has been steady, including our daily antivirus updates. We've not had any problems. Stability is very important to us because if this goes down then we don't get any email.

We are not really seeing a heavy load on the machine that we host it on, so I assume it could go much higher. Now, we have a 500-user license, but we seem to be going over it every day. For example, at the moment, it's showing 755, so we're probably going to increase to a 1,000-user license when it comes up for renewal in another month.

With a current load of approximately 6%, I'm sure that it can easily go to 10,000 users on our hardware.

Everyone in the company uses it, although I and the CTO are the only two administrators. Our CTO takes care of the management, whereas I am the network/security administrator. I normally perform the maintenance, although the CTO does it sometimes.

If I need support, I can immediately send a ticket and click connect on the website. They'll be able to go in and do whatever they need to fix an issue.

Initially, we were hesitant to join because they are based out of Ireland and we were concerned about being able to get support. However, it's never been an issue. I'm the main contact for support, and I might call them once a year for a weird issue. Usually, they get back to me within 30 minutes.

I would definitely rate their support a ten out of ten.

Positive

Before SpamTitan, we used to use MailGate, from Tumbleweed. The biggest difference between these two products was the price. The functionality was very close to the same but SpamTitan is approximately 30% of the price. Similarly, both are pretty stable and I wouldn't say that one was more stable than the other.

We switched because everything seemed to be as good as it was with solutions from the other big providers, with a huge difference in cost.

It took us approximately an hour to set it up, and most of that time was on Office 365 to route incoming mail through SpamTitan first.

Ease of setup is something that was more important to me than it was to management. They would have preferred to use a free, open-source product. The problem with the open-source products is that anytime we needed to make a configuration change, it would take three or four days of research to figure out how to do it.

This is in contrast to SpamTitan, where there are only eight or nine tabs, with eight or nine subtabs on each one. For the most part, setting it requires visiting perhaps six tabs. If you have a question about any of the features, there is a question mark icon on the browser explaining each one. It's pretty well organized from the administration side.

We implemented it ourselves.

We have realized ROI from our time savings. It has saved me hundreds of hours because we have people in one department that would constantly click on links that were bad. Most people would know not to click on them but certain people would always click on malicious links. Once that happened, they had a virus and it was sending out viruses to everyone in their email contacts.

Every time that happened, it cost me between 50 and 60 hours of time to fix the problem. It was an absolute nightmare that used to happen once or twice per month, and now the incidence of that has gone down to almost nothing. 

We implemented SpamTitan over other solutions because of its price. The functionality of all of these services is pretty much even, with the main differences between them being support options and where you can deploy them.

For other vendors, we had to purchase their hardware or employ a cloud solution that adds thousands of dollars per year to the cost. SpamTitan is something that you can put on your own hardware and it runs great.

The only additional cost was for Link. It isn't expensive, at perhaps a dollar extra per user.

Management was interested in saving costs by using an open-source solution. However, they are more difficult and time-consuming to configure.

We also looked at Barracuda and we didn't find much difference between the two, except for cost. We chose SpamTitan because it is more cost-effective.

We have not had any issues with the product, the pricing is probably better than most vendors, and the support is definitely top-notch.

My advice for others is that if you're looking for a simple solution that you can deploy quickly, especially if you're on a budget, then I definitely recommend SpamTitan. You can have a full solution within a day.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We use SpamTitan as our email filtering solution.

We are in a college setting.

We have had excellent results with this product. Within a week of implementing SpamTitan, it blocked a ransomware event. This made our jobs a lot easier. Within the past six months, we've had 1.3 million emails come in, and out of those, 900,000 were clean. It's blocked 40 viruses.

It's blocked 115,000 emails from either invalid recipients or from different types of filters that it has, such as Real-Time Black List Filtering (RBL), or HELO reject.

In the beginning, we had issues with false positives while the system was using its AI to learn. We've only had one major incident, and that was due to the way our college wrote the email. It was worded so that students would reply, and SpamTitan thought that this was spam being sent. I had to fix that in the system. This problem wasn't SpamTitan's fault; rather, it was the way that we had set it up that caused it to act that way.

Overall, it has improved our security posture.

The most valuable feature is the reporting on bounced emails. If an email has been blocked or bounced, or a client tells me that they're not receiving a certain email, I can go into the reports and rather quickly look to see if it's shown up at all. If it has, I can either release it to the client or tell them what happened with it. Overall, the reporting is excellent.

The interface is very user-friendly and you can access it from anywhere in the world. It is easy to use, very well thought out and doesn't have a steep learning curve.

This product is excellent in terms of its overall intuitiveness.

The only downside is that there is a delay when we're waiting for a report to be generated. It normally takes between 30 seconds and a minute when you're dealing with more than a million emails.

I have been working with TitanHQ SpamTitan for approximately six months.

This is a very reliable tool. I look up logs every day, especially when clients say that they can't find an email. The system has not been down in the time that we've had it running.

The scalability is awesome. If we need more licenses then we call them and they take care of it.

The communication with them is perfect. In fact, we had a call with them earlier today that they initiated, which is awesome for customer service. We were doing biweekly checkups and now, we're moving to quarterly checkups.

The customer service is excellent. If there is a problem then a lot of the time, they know before we do. Compared to the technical support that I have experienced with other vendors, TitanHQ is top-notch.

I would rate the technical support a ten out of ten. They don't hesitate to help, which is unheard of in the IT industry.

Positive

This is the first spam solution that we used. The college knew that other colleges were being hacked, so I was brought in as a security person.

I started with the help desk and when I moved up to the security role, I saw that we didn't have a spam filtering solution in place. This is when we looked into implementing one.

We had the system set up and configured within 30 minutes. Being able to set it up quickly was important to us because we needed something as soon as possible. We wanted something that we could implement without too much setup on our side.

The vendor assisted us with the setup. We use Gmail, and they helped us with our Gmail configuration including setting up the folders. After that, the filter was working.

Just for myself and my team, using SpamTitan saves at least two hours per week.

We pay for licenses and the price structure is very clean. You don't have to pay for on-premises equipment and perhaps a monthly service fee for hardware.

When I began my search, I went to some security forums and looked at some online publications that I read frequently. I started with a list of perhaps 15 solutions, which got narrowed down to five and then got narrowed down to one.

One of the other products was Barracuda, and it was the price that set it apart.

Also, I like that with SpamTitan, there is no on-premises device that I have to maintain. I only have to pay for the license and don't have to pay for equipment with a monthly fee.

SpamTitan provides a feature that can be used for geo-blocking, although we don't use it because we're a college and we have international students.

My advice for anybody who is considering this solution is to definitely try it. Give them a chance because they gave us a free month to test it. When we first started looking, they acted like we were already one of their customers. They didn't just give us a link and tell us to figure it out. Rather, we set up a phone meeting, got everything set up, and we were running on their system for a month before we decided to adopt it. They gave us plenty of time to test their product before we purchased it. That was a big deciding factor in our decision to implement it.

In summary, this is an awesome system. They have other products and we're currently looking at them.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

Our primary use case is filtering incoming emails.

SpamTitan is a product that saves us time. The less spam that you have, the more time you have because you're not digging through the mail that hits your inbox. The other thing is that it blocks potential trojans, viruses, and phishing attempts. This means that IT has less to deal with in case something does get through and opened, resulting in an infection.

On the front end, the user community doesn't have nearly as much email to deal with, in particular, spam messages. On the back end for IT, it's a huge time saver because we're not infecting our network with malware.

Before we got SpamTitan, the amount of time spent dealing with unwanted emails depended on the user. People that were dealing with a lot of outside entities would receive more spam because their email address is out there. Depending on the user, they might have three or four spam messages, or somebody might have between 20 and 30 to deal with.

For people on the higher end, with 20 or 30 spam messages that are hitting their inbox, it's time-consuming to go through and determine whether something is valid or invalid. In some cases, an email says it's coming from within the company, perhaps somebody in our purchasing department. When another employee sees the name, they assume it's safe but in reality, it's a spoofed email address. People often don't feel like digging into it so they just look at the email, resulting in the introduction of a trojan, virus, or other malware.

The amount of time that it takes to deal with spam messages varies. It depends on the type of spam that is hitting the inbox. In the morning when you fire up your email program, a high-end user may spend 15 to 20 minutes going through stuff just to make sure it's valid or not valid.

Then, throughout the day, these people were getting spam messages. It eats your time, even with one or two here and there, because you're taking time to maybe open the message, then investigate if it's really coming from a valid address or not. Even if it only takes a minute to do one message, and you get 15 of those a day, that's 15 minutes of your time. That's quite valuable.

We have thousands of users so even if 2,000 of them get five spam messages a day, and it takes each one a minute to deal with, it's a lot of time.

Using SpamTitan has immensely improved our spam catch rate and reduced our false positive rate. In a five-year timeframe, it has blocked between 60 million and 70 million messages. 

The most valuable feature is the protection that it offers against spam, phishing, viruses, and other such attacks. That's the biggest benefit of the product.

We use the geo-blocking feature, which helps to reduce our spam intake. There are known locations that are notorious for sending spam, viruses, and so forth, which is one of the reasons we use it. Right now, our filter is blocking approximately 75% of the mail that hits our door. Only 26% of the mail we get actually passes.

We use the geo-blocking feature for restricting emails based on country, and it works well. However, if something does pass that is spam or a phishing attempt, then we may block by IP address if necessary. This is very important to our organization because spam email is bad, and it's a problem for us.

We are able to create exceptions based on a trusted sender's specific location or IP address, and it works fine for that. We don't have a large rule base and in most cases, the senders, who are typically customers or vendors that we deal with, do not have their email exchange set up properly. They don't have the proper checks in place, so we add exceptions for them.

The user interface is good, and it's pretty easy to use once you learn your way around. That said, there's a lot to it and it's in-depth. There are many aspects to the interface, and there are a lot of tabs.

Overall, in terms of the system's intuitiveness, it's okay. When you click on a tab for system settings, as an example, there are multiple tabs that you can drill down into from there. Sometimes, it can be a little bit difficult to find out where you want to go, just because there are many layers to the interface.

It is difficult to say how I might improve it. There are many pieces to it, and a lot of layers, but the way they have it set up is fine. Sometimes, however, you have to search around a little bit to find out where you want to go.

There are eight main tabs and once you click on one of those tabs, it takes you into another area where there can be up to eight or ten other things that you can click into. Then, when you get in there, it might be another six or eight areas that you can look at.

If you go into system setup, as an example, and then go to static routing for network configuration, that's three layers deep. You would probably figure that the network configuration is going to be in the system setup, so you would start there intuitively, but it's a lot of options.

One of the areas that can be improved is the GUI. The product works well but finding things in the interface can sometimes be a bit difficult, just because it's so in-depth and covers a lot.

We have been using TitanHQ SpamTitan for approximately five years.

This is a very stable product. We have not had any downtime and we have not had the product crash on us, where it was not filtering mail.

We have not rebooted our server for five years.

SpamTitan is easily scalable. If you give them more money, they'll give you more licenses.

We are a large company with many factories in Mexico, China, Vietnam, and several US cities. We have several thousand employees and in the past five years of using SpamTitan, we have blocked between 60 million and 70 million messages.

We have 100% adoption. Any email coming into our company has to go through this filter before it hits our Exchange server and then is distributed to the user community. 

The technical support is really good. I've had great luck with the support group out of Titan HQ. They are quick to respond and typically have a solution very quickly. If they don't, they'll dig into it and keep updating you as to where they're at in the process of finding a solution. Overall, I'm pleased with the support.

I would rate their support a nine out of ten. It's not a perfect rating because there is always that time when you don't get the exact answer you want, or they can't do exactly what you want. In any case, that could be a software update or something that has to be reprogrammed. They will send that up to development, but sometimes it takes time for that to happen.

If comparing support to other vendors, their response time is very quick. When you open a ticket, you get a response right away that they acknowledge that you've submitted a help desk ticket with them. Then typically you'll get a response from the tech at Titan HQ that has picked up the ticket.

They'll let you know either right then about a solution, or that they're investigating. Typically you will hear back, I would say normally within the hour, with a solution, or potential questions to help with a solution.

I would rate them above average as far as their response time and working through issues.

Positive

Prior to using SpamTitan, we were using the filtering that is part of our Microsoft Exchange.

It's quite easy to set up. There are a lot of defaults that are set up in how it functions and what it does. Then, as you start using the product more, you can get more in-depth and put more controls and filters in place. As far as initially setting it up, the process is pretty easy.

Having it easy to set up is always an important thing. The less time you have to spend configuring and setting up a product, the more time you have for doing other things.

From start to finish, we spent approximately one day getting it set up. The server was installed, the software was installed, and then we set up getting our mail routed through it.

After the initial setup, there is some programming and other things that you do over time. But, I wouldn't consider that as part of the installation process.

We did the implementation ourselves, with the help of Titan HQ. Our experience with them has been good. The products that they sell are typically good and easy to use, so you'll potentially put them into other locations or buy more licenses.

The deployment can be done with one person, and we have a couple of people on staff that take care of it. If there are issues with false positives or things of that nature, we've got a couple of people on staff that oversee it. That's not their only job; they're network administrators or systems admins and they have multiple tasks. That said, they have a couple of people that are familiar with the product and work on it.

Pricing is on par with other products, and it's reasonable. They have different categories as far as the size of your company and how they license it, which is good.

We evaluated three or four products at the time, although it was several years ago and I don't recall exactly which ones.

We preferred SpamTitan after looking at other customer reviews, talking with some references, and they just came out the winner as far as capabilities. Support is a big thing for anybody when it comes to dealing with a product, and it's important because you're potentially blocking viruses and other malware that could harm the company very badly.

My advice for anybody who is looking into implementing this product is to first go through their demo with them and make sure you understand how in-depth the product is because there's a lot to it. If the end-user wants a product that they plug in and turn on and they never have to look at it again, SpamTitan is not it.

This is an in-depth product and there are multiple ways to block things, although it is fairly plug-and-play with their default configuration. Other than just the actual configuration of IP addresses and things of that nature, there's a lot to it.

I know there are simpler options out there, but they also are not as comprehensive as what you can do with the product.

Overall, as far as the product goes and how it catches things, I'm quite happy with it. Ninety percent of the time, it does a great job. There is that 10% that sometimes you may want to try and do something with it, and it doesn't have the capability. That is pretty rare and when it happens, typically they will send that to development, and development will come up with a solution.

It may take a little time for them because I'm sure they have a huge backlog of things, but it's not like they tell you it's something they're not going to do. Instead, they'll send it to the development team and explain that there is an issue that the customer wants to be corrected or a capability that they want to have added. At that point, it will go up the chain within their organization.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.