TitanHQ SpamTitan Reviews

SpamTitan is used for spam protection, nothing else. That's what it does, and it does it well. SpamTitan Plus is nice because we can offer it to our clients. We use SpamTitan internally, but also resell it. SpamTitan Plus has additional security features like filtering out spoofing links. 

We mostly use SpamTitan with Microsoft 365, and it covers about 500 users. Almost all our customers are Microsoft 365 or G suite. 

SpamTitan reduces the overall amount of spam we have to deal with, which saves all our users some time because they don't need to sit there and sift through all of that.

I can't say that SpamTitan has helped us obtain any new clients. It's more like the other way around. We help TitanHQ get new clients because we're paying them for their product. I would say it's had zero effect on our client base.

It provides a value add to our clients because it's another security service that we can offer them in our security suite, which includes antivirus, spam protection, password, and things of that nature. We also now offer ArcTitan, their email archiving solution. It's a full range of security products we offer, and SpamTitan is one of those products.

SpamTitan addresses spoofing, phishing, and any other email-based threat. It adds great value. I like the fact that SpamTitan Plus has the ability to filter every link. There's no way to stop that entirely because viruses and malware are constantly evolving, so it's not foolproof. It gets around 90 percent of the malicious traffic that comes through. 

I like the fact that SpamTitan filters out phishing and spoofing links. They call it AI-driven threat protection. Though I'm a highly educated, advanced computer user, I still like not having to pay attention to where the link is going. I can trust that SpamTitan will filter it out nine times out of 10. 

It's a huge value add for clients who aren't tech savvy because they often click on links in their emails they think are legit, installing some type of malware or virus on their PCs by doing so. Anti-phishing is a new feature, but the standard spam protection, filtering, and antivirus are good too. It has two antivirus filters: Clam and Bitdefender. I think it's great to keep the viruses out of email boxes.

We use geoblocking internally and for our clients. I believe SpamTitan does that by default, so I don't know if there's a specific setting for that, and I don't spend much time in the control panel. I know that you can manually block a domain. It's handy to block spam from a domain that you now isn't legitimate. That's a nice feature.

SpamTitan uses artificial intelligence to train itself and assigns each piece of mail a rating from zero to whatever. The higher the rating, the more likely it is to be spam. If the score is below 10, it's usually not spam. It does a pretty good job of determining whether it's going to be garbage.

The admin management portal needs a facelift. I've asked them for a way to authenticate admins of the organizations that want to admin the SpamTitan product itself. Adding additional management security would be a great feature. 

There are a few tiny improvements they could also make. For instance, the GUI itself is a little outdated, and it could be more user friendly. The same goes for ArcTitan. It's got a horrible GUI that's worse than SpamTitan. It also could use that authentication mechanism upgrade as well. I would also suggest combining the two products into one control panel. 

The spam filters could always improve. The standard spam protection is probably the least perfect feature. It does a great job with viruses and phishing. The spam filter isn't bad. It's just that spam filtering is its primary purpose, but it's the thing SpamTitan does the least well. That's not a complaint though. It's just a fact of life. You get billions and billions of emails. It's impossible to get a system that perfectly filters out all the trash. 

We've been using SpamTitan for about three years, if not more.  We just upgraded to SpamTitan Plus about a month ago.

SpamTitan is relatively stable. We've never had an outage. We've had configuration problems, but that's on our end.

It hasn't had any issues with scalability so far. It seems to handle the resources properly. However, I believe it comes down to the amount of AWS resources you throw at it. I don't think there are any issues with the application itself.

Sometimes, it's hard to get ahold of somebody in support, but they seem to know what they're doing when you get in touch with them. They definitely know their stuff, and the engineers are great to work with. It doesn't seem to be a problem if you schedule it. However, it would be hard to reach a support engineer if I jumped on the phone right now.

I'd give them an eight out of 10. I deduct two points because it's sometimes hard to contact the engineers. Otherwise, they have done a great job and they always answer our questions instantly. It's hard to compare their support to others because I've never used another spam solution, and I don't think it's fair to compare it to other tech companies

Positive

Before we adopted SpamTitan, we were using Office 365's built-in spam protection. Microsoft does a basic job of finding spam, but it's not a specialized solution like TitanHQ. 

I played a managerial role in the deployment, but I didn't handle the details. I believe it was pretty straightforward. The most difficult part was configuring the Office 365 portion inside the Exchange control panel. The rest was smooth sailing.

One engineer is enough, and it takes about 30 minutes per client when we deploy it for our customers. If the initial setup is done, we only need to add the domain, configure the domain spam setting, and set it up on the client's mail server somewhere, such as Office 365.

SpamTitan is more of an ancillary service that we bundle in our security package. It isn't something we're getting rich off of. We pretty much break even, with a slight uptick in revenue.

We get MSP pricing, which is better than retail. The spam solutions are generally priced the same across the board, but SpamTitan is a little less expensive than some of the premium spam services. 

At the same time, I'm not quite sure you get a whole lot more from a premium spam service versus SpamTitan. That's why we went with it. We didn't see the value in spending more money. Who's to say that the other competitors had better artificial intelligence for their spam protection? That's really the only difference between one anti-spam provider and another.

We analyzed four or five different vendors, and SpamTitan had the best features and capabilities. 

I'd give SpamTitan a solid eight out of 10. It's an excellent product at a reasonable price. If you need spam protection, I think it's a good value. It's pretty easy to use, but there are a few things I'd like to see, like a new GUI on the control panel and an updated authentication system. Aside from that, SpamTitan does its job well. 

There's always room for improvement. I only take two points off because no product is ever perfect. I can't even think of a product that would get a perfect 10 from me off the top of my head except for maybe an Eddie Van Halen 5150. That was perfect.

We primarily use the solution to filter out all the spam messages and go through and review other messages that get tagged as spam and figure out what's real and what's not.

It's cut down on our amount of spam. It has cut down on the number of ransomware attacks which are all generated from email. It's definitely helped out that way. Occasionally I do get one where I need to ask "Hey, is this real?" However, I can go in there and look through the filter and see that one got through, with another 30 being blocked. In the learning pattern that it offers, it can realize tricky emails may have been spam and will tag everybody else's as spam as well. That way, only one, maybe two users might get it. It is really good at seeing and learning. 

The spam blocking has been good. I like the fact that I can go back in and review old messages that had been tagged as spam before my users can get to them and either delete them so they can't approve them or allow them through.

We use SpamTitan's geo-blocking feature. I have many rules set up. Obviously, in the spam world, the spammers find ways around not being tagged as spam. We tend to get the same type of messages over and over again. Therefore, I have phrases set up to block messages. We're blocking mail by region as well. The geo-blocking feature for restricting emails from specific destinations based on IP or country is fantastic. It works great. All of our business here is done throughout the U.S. and therefore we block most of the stuff from other countries. If I start to see a bad habit form I can block that country or region.

It's not always just spam. A lot of times it can be phishing attempts. There may be people trying to email, saying "Here's your invoice for this product," and it was obvious it's not a product that they had ever ordered. In this day and age with phishing and ransomware, things come through via an unassuming email. We need to protect ourselves against ransomware and this works great. I don't care about junk messages that come through about buy this, buy that, and all this stuff. It's more of the ransomware that I get concerned with and we're trying to block it.

The geo-blocking feature allows us to block spam emails entering our network and servers, reducing our spam intake. In terms of spam reduction, it does equally as well as some of the other items that we've used. However, I really like the features. I would say it easily catches 95% or more of spam. Occasionally, you do get something that slips through, and it's always going to happen.

The user interface experience of SpamTitan is "easy peasy." I like the user interface. It's fairly self-explanatory, fairly easy to figure out, and if I ever have a question, I can call them up or open a support ticket and get an answer really fast. Their support team is fantastic.

It has helped to improve our false positive rate. We don't have very many false positives. The only time I have false positives is from rules that I created. I get people that will sometimes use a phrase or something that will get caught up in the filter. False positives are my own fault, from me tightening security down even further than it should, as I have certain phrases that I use in there, and if somebody puts one of those phrases in, word for word, then they're going to get blocked, and that's happened a couple of times. However, it allows me to go through to check. The users will say, "Hey, I was waiting for an email from this person. They say they sent it and I haven't got it," and then I see them, I see that message in there, and I release it.

It probably saves employees some time. I've never asked them directly, however, I know it has to save them time as they don't have to go through all those messages and figure out what's good and what's bad.

Sometimes when I'm trying to pull up reports, the speed can suffer. If I'm looking at the last seven days, if I pull up just today, when it's retrieving the message history, if I pull up with the last hour or the last, or that day, it's fine. However, if I have to go back several days, it could take a little longer than I'd like it. That said, I'm usually not in a rush. Still, sometimes it does get stuck there for maybe a minute or two. It makes me question the network, however, when I check the network speed, it seems fine. It's not a major, major concern. However, if I had anything, I would ask that they try to find a way to retrieve those older messages faster.

We switched over to SpamTitan in 2020, although we did have it before and we had to archive it. We started using it right around April or May of 2020. It's been about two years now that we've been using SpamTitan.

The stability of the solution has been great. It's been a stable platform. The only one thing I could ask for is when you're going through to older histories it's just a little slow when you're trying to pull up messages older than a day or two. You try to pull up messages that are three, four, or five days old to go look for an old message, and it just seems like it wants to take a little longer than it should. We're also on a cloud solution. I don't know how many other users are on this cloud. Maybe it has to do with too many users on the cloud trying to do searches or incoming mails at the same time. I'm sure they'll figure it out. 

It's pretty scalable. It works. We have it for our particular organization and it just fits perfectly. We make it work for us. We have certain email addresses that we always allow through and sometimes it does catch a false positive. Our false positives are a lot less, and that's due to the rules I created. It's just whitelisting those and blacklisting the other ones that we don't want. It works great.

I have 30 users, however, some people have double email addresses as they have an alias address. We're dealing with about 40 email addresses. 

Their support is A+. If I can give them an 11 or a 12 out of ten, I would. They've always been there for me when I've had questions. They've answered anything I've asked within a very reasonable amount of time, and if I've ever needed any help they've always been there to jump on in and explain why.

Positive

I switched when I took back over for this company. We had an in-house solution, a Barracuda box, which was in-house, and when it was time to upgrade the hardware, Barracuda was just too expensive. It worked really well when we first got it. We enjoyed it when we first got it. However, also with Barracuda, I had to be onsite or VPN'd in so that I could look at messages, whereas with SpamTitan I can be out there doing wherever. 

I first demoed SpamTitan five years ago when I was working for a different company, and we went through their demo process of it, and then when we went through to do the purchase of it, the credit card transaction failed as it was out of country. It was based out of Ireland. The owners didn't want to do business where money was going overseas. In the end, they made me find a local company.

We went with a different company that was local to the U.S. then and used them for that company. However, when I came back to this company where I'm at now, and we decided, "Okay, well it's time to get rid of this Barracuda box," I went straight to SpamTitan as I had already had experience with them and with SpamHero, which was web-based. It was nice, however, I remember that I had liked SpamTitan so much better and I was a little frustrated at the ownership of the other company that they didn't want to go with the SpamTitan.

To me, the interface and the ease of use were a lot better, whereas the other one, when I hired a new user, it would quarantine all their mail until I went in there and there was an extra step that I had to take on another product that we had. 

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. The instructions that they include with it are easy. It was very easy to set up through Office365 in my DNS. The instructions were straight and clear, right to the point. I probably could have given this to my kid and he could have figured it out.

The ease of setup and ease of use is always important. However, I don't remember how long it took me to set up. I would say when we had it in-house and our mail was coming in-house, it was set up fairly easy. I want to say it took no longer than 20 minutes just to get it set up and working.

I had to call TitanHQ at the outset. I had questions about the way the phrases worked. It wasn't really with the setup of it, however. While I didn't need them for the setup, when I was looking to block phrases, I wanted to make sure I wasn't looping myself and causing myself more of a headache. I did have questions on blocking certain messages, as we also had one email address that nobody else has that we didn't want messages to be filtered from. I did have to call them to ask them, "Hey, how can I make messages to this one user not get filtered so they get everything?" We got them on the phone and we had it fixed in less than five minutes.

We've definitely seen an ROI in terms of just the amount of spam that's cut back and hack attempts that we've been able to block and filter out. For those reasons alone, it's definitely worth it.

It is probably one of the more reasonably priced options out there. SpamHero was right in line with the same pricing. However, their interface and their usability are not as easy as SpamTitan. 

You get fantastic service with this product. In contrast, if I wanted to call Barracuda with an issue, they never returned calls. It's all web-based, so you can't get anybody on the phone if you need stuff with Barracuda, and when you do it's like pulling teeth. 

With SpamTitan, based on their price and actually being able to get somebody on the phone, it just made it worth every penny.

I did not look at other options. As soon as I came back to this company and realized that we needed to switch from Barracuda when it was time to upgrade the hardware, I knew we were more budget conscience. Barracuda is nice, however, it breaks the budget, and it was also a physical device that was in the building. I couldn't remotely manage it. I remembered SpamTitan and the demo I did before and decided to definitely go with them.

With SpamTitan we have our mail, mail that used to be in-house, until July 2021. Now we're using Office365 for our main mail, however, our SpamTitan has always been hosted on its own cloud. We're on the SpamTitan cloud.

I'd advise any new users to just sign up. Just don't even bother considering it, just sign up and go with it. You won't regret it. Its ease of use, ease of setup, and ease of admin all make it worthwhile. Everything is just so easy.

I'd rate the solution a ten out of ten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are using it as a gateway antivirus. It is for spam protection of our Exchange Server.

It offers gateway protection. It allows our Exchange Server to be hidden behind the network. It limits the exposure to our Exchange Server. 

It saves me an hour a day by not having to go through people's spam. It gives me a little bit of confidence knowing that we have the ability to very quickly block out attachments that we don't want, such as macro-enabled spreadsheets or even HTML files. It's a big vector. It's very easy to configure to block and graylist a lot of things that we see coming in as a vector for email attacks. So, it gives us much better security overall, as well as some time savings on the administration side.

Content filtering as well as Link Lock, which is URL parsing, are valuable, but anti-spam would be the biggest feature to help reduce overall spam for the company. It allows users to control what spam gets quarantined, etc. Before we had SpamTitan, it was me going through 300 emails a day to whitelist or release items from quarantine, and now people could do it themselves. It has literally saved me an hour a day just doing that.

The interface is a little dated aesthetically. I know that's a small thing, but it could use a little bit of a facelift. 

The only other thing is to have more flexibility for multi-domain environments, but I don't know if it is technically possible. Currently, the sending and receiving is limited to your one domain. If you need to split the sending of emails through using different certificates, you don't have the ability to do that. So, multi-domain flexibility would be nice. Outside of that, technically, I haven't found any problems with it.

I have been using this solution for almost a year.

I had some issues with the last update. It was a little concerning at the time because we could see the emails queuing up in the system, and we couldn't understand why they weren't being released to the end users in the backend. A quick call to support again fixed that. So, there was a hiccup, but the support was there to assist. We were back up and running within 10 to 15 minutes.

I can't really compare its stability to our previous solution considering the fact that we didn't have anything that we managed by ourselves. We don't have anything to compare it to because the Exchange Server handled all the spam before we had this. Exchange is just as stable as sitting on a three-legged stool. So, I would say that it's stable.

We haven't run into that in terms of disk space and other things to see what it would take to expand it beyond its usage. Currently, I see scalability as not being a problem. If I needed to add more resources to the virtual machine, I could in a heartbeat. Licensing is easy to add on. It's just a support call to pay for more licensing, which is also cost-effective. So, I see it as being a scalable product.

In terms of our plans to expand its usage, we are always growing as a company. We're always adding more demand onto it just through natural hiring and expansion. It's still meeting our day-to-day needs.

They're very responsive. They don't have a phone number to call. You have to email them in order to get that phone call. The lack of a ticketing type of help desk setup is the only thing that is a stumbling block, but otherwise, they are very responsive.

Positive

On the government side of things, they used to use URL parsing as well. I can't remember the name of it. It was a big one, but they dropped it because it was so expensive, and we couldn't afford to pick it up. This has link parsing as well, and it still comes with the appliance. 

Its deployment is private. We host it on our own. It's with our own environment. The way we have it deployed is that we have all of our locations across the province. We have VPNed into one central location where we host all of our servers, our Exchange, etc. The SpamTitan appliance sits on that central network, and from there, our email would come in again over the internet or through the government, and then it would go through the appliance to the Exchange Server. That's it in a nutshell. We have a hyper-conversion infrastructure with HP SimpliVity. So, it's sitting on a virtual machine running on VMware right now.

Its initial setup was straightforward. Their documentation was very thorough. I had it all set up as a virtual appliance before I made a call to them to help run through the rest of the setup. They had it up and running within 10 minutes.

There is a very small learning curve. Their support is good. They do call you within a reasonable time. There are a lot of settings in this appliance that can be confusing or inundating to people that aren't familiar with the terminologies or the technologies. So, it can be a little bit intimidating, but I found that for the basic setup, for what you need, it works really well. For any of the advanced tasks, it's only a matter of going to the website to find out how to configure it.

In terms of the ease of use being a factor when deciding to go with SpamTitan, if it's something complex, I would expect good support to be there to help me through it, and if it's something simple, then all the better. So, I don't usually worry about setup as long as support is efficient enough to deal with it. In this case, SpamTitan was, so I didn't find it at all hard to set up or configure or go through the settings. We were up and running in about 10 minutes, so I'd consider that pretty good. I'd rate it an eight out of ten in terms of ease of setup. 

In terms of updates, there are updates that become available probably three times a year. I've only seen it once since we deployed it. So, that maintenance is required to update, but otherwise, the system is pretty self-sufficient.

We have 100% seen an ROI. We see something come in through a single vector, and we're able to squash it before it does any major damage. On the administration side of things, it's amazing. I can move on things a lot faster with SpamTitan. When I see an attack come in, I can easily stop it in its tracks and prevent it from moving forward really quickly. It has absolutely been a godsend.

Its pricing is good. It's probably one of the most competitive anti-spam and anti-malware appliances out there for email. I was doing some looking around for pricing before I came to SpamTitan, and for the feature set, the price is very reasonable and competitive.

There is an additional cost to Link Lock for link parsing. That was a separate add-on. It's called SpamTitan Plus, and that's how they bundled it. We opted to have that protection as well.

We were trialing Darktrace just to see what it would do. It was decent but grossly expensive. It was tethered to another product that we didn't have a need for. So, we did a trial of that product, and we did have some other experience with the government solution, but this one, we manage ourselves. It does a very good job for the price that you're paying for it. It's very cost-effective.

There is a free evaluation option. Take it and try it out. It's easy to slip into your network and see how it works before you buy it. The support team is there to help you everywhere in between. Try before you buy. That's the best advice that I can give, and chances are you'll like it.

We are currently not using the geo-blocking feature because we are receiving our email through a smart host, where all the emails are filtered through the government to us. It only appears as one geo-location. Another reason why we decided to go with this kind of appliance or virtual appliance was that we're moving away from that platform, and we'll be wide open to the internet, and we didn't want our Exchange Server completely exposed. Within about two months, this system will be handling all External emails from across the world, and we will be geoblocking some countries known to be big malicious users.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. It does its job, and it allows me to pivot in ways that I didn't think I needed to before. If I cared more about the looks, I'd probably give it a seven, but in terms of functionality and how it works, I don't have a problem with it. It works really well.

SpamTitan filters all incoming mail. We don't allow anything to come into our mail server without passing through SpamTitan. It filters out malware, spam, and any other email-based threat. It's a SaaS solution that's entirely on the cloud. Everything is redirected from our server to the SpamTitan servers.

They do the necessary filtering and pass all the safe emails through to our server. Our servers are configured to only accept IP connections from three or four IP addresses that are specific to SpamTitan, so nobody else can get into the mail server.

Our system consists of two physical servers and several virtual servers. One box is in the office, and there's a backup server at my home. The mail server just happens to be my home. We have about seven or eight end users, but each user can have multiple accounts.  

For example, we have an account for receiving special categories of mail that are placed in a designated folder. In other words, we create accounts that are associated with individual people. We have an online credit card processing company, so when they send emails, it goes to an email address called info@wegmanlevin.com. When it arrives here, it gets split off into a separate folder.

SpamTitan reduced the spam and malware that gets to our Outlook clients. The prior solution we used didn't do that great a job with malware. I don't know if the time spent sorting through spam has changed compared to the previous solution. 

However, sometimes malware would get wrongly classified as spam. Some emails that used to get through were flagged as spam, but it actually turned out to be malware. That should never have gotten through at all. It should have been blocked or stripped. In some cases, malware infected people's systems with the previous solution. 

I like the ability to go online and view mail that's been quarantined. SpamTitan lets you look at the mail and decide whether you want to release it or not.

SpamTitan doesn't quarantine when it blocks things based on the remote block list or greylisting. It just deletes the email. When I try to look at these blocked items, it tells me they're gone. RBL or greylisted items aren't saved, so you can check them. There may be a setting somewhere that I haven't seen. 

We get some false positives sometimes. Once we spot it, we can add the sender to the safe list. Then it's no longer a problem. It seems kind of random at times. For example, I got an email last night from the fraud department at Chase Bank informing me that my card had been compromised. It was flagged as spam, so I logged in and released it. It's a balancing act between a spam solution that's overly aggressive or too loose about letting spam in. I think SpamTitan falls on the aggressive side, but it's usually not enough to cause any problems.

I would also like more control over reporting. The reporting is limited to once daily. With the old product, we could get reports multiple times during the day with all the emails quarantined since the last report went out. We had one report at 8:00 a.m. to tell us about all the overnight traffic. We'd also get notifications at noon, and 5:00 p.m., just before people went home.

Over the course of the day, only a few hours would pass before we reviewed a quarantined email. SpamTitan sends its report in the middle of the night, so something can be trapped there for 24 hours. There's a workaround. If somebody tells you an email they were expecting hasn't come through, an admin can go into the portal and release it. That's a hassle. 

Also, there's an attack where a hacker generates emails with the correct domain name but hundreds of different user names. SpamTitan bills by the number of users, and they don't allow you to distinguish between real users and bots. I think I have a limit of around 30 or 35 users, so if somebody hit me with hundreds of phony names, I would get reports generated for each one of those fake accounts and be billed for it. It hasn't happened, but it could. I'm not crazy about that aspect of it. I think it would make a lot more sense if I could give TitanHQ a list of all valid email addresses and tell them to bounce any other email addresses.

We have been using SpamTitan for about a year and a half. 

We haven't had any issues with stability

We're a small law firm, so I haven't had a reason to scale up SpamTitan, but I assume I could if necessary. It's not likely to happen in my business. If we doubled in size, that would mean going from seven to 14 people. I'm sure that wouldn't present an issue for the software. However, if we had hundreds of employees, I would prefer an on-premise hardware solution.

I've never had a problem that required support, but I contacted TitanHQ support initially with questions about how to tweak some settings. I rate TitanHQ support nine out of ten. 

Positive

We used SurfControl, but the version was no longer supported on our server. We originally ran this on the Windows 2003 server, but the product wouldn't install when we upgraded. When we approached the vendor about newer products, we found that all their latest solutions were online and a lot more expensive than SpamTitan, so I started to shop around.

I set SpamTitan up by myself. It was straightforward once I conceptualized exactly what we were doing and the way we were deploying this in the middle of our mail delivery cycle. We have updated the configuration by adding more domains since the original implementation and it was easy.

If it blocks one piece of malware from getting into my system, it has probably paid for itself several times over.

The cost of SpamTitan is reasonable for what we get out of the solution. 

I don't recall the names of all the solutions we evaluated,  but looked at Barracuda and a couple of others. We felt that SpamTitan was the best fit, given the size of our operation, monthly costs, etc.

I rate SpamTitan eight out of ten. It's a great option if you're a smaller organization that wants to keep spam and malware off your system. A larger organization may wish to consider the on-premise solution TitanHQ offers because of the licensing issues and limitations on reporting. I recommend that if it's cost-effective for your organization.

We use it for filtering spam.

We saw the benefits the same day that we deployed it. Normally, our client would get between 300 and 600 spam emails each day, and we reduced that to 15 on the first day. That was a real win and they were very glad we implemented it.

Employees used to take about two hours a day to sift through all the spam emails that were coming in, to see if they were valid or not. Now, it is just an afterthought. They spend two to three minutes because so few spam emails come through. They just need to take a quick glance and say, "Well, okay, I need to have that one and the rest are spam emails."

What I like the most is the filtering and the granularity with which you can really zoom in on the spam that's coming in and configure it exactly so that what you don't want is blocked.

What I also love about SpamTitan is that you can deploy it on your own hardware, so if there are any performance issues you can just upgrade the hardware and you'll be fine.

I'd like to see something like "My First SpamTitan," by which I mean, "Guide me through the things I need to set, and tell me about the things that you're setting already." That way I would get a good feeling for setting up the product, rather than having to figure it out by myself, which is what I did. It wasn't a big issue because I've configured spam filters before, but I think someone else might be overwhelmed with all the options you can set.

They can either keep it as it is, which is rather technical in looks and in management, or they can have more of a "My First SpamTitan" interface, which would guide you through things and give you a good configuration at the start. Later, you could perfect it by tuning it yourself. Something like that would be nice.

I have been using TitanHQ SpamTitan since 2016 or 2017.

It's very stable. We have never had it go down unless it was our own fault. Overall, the stability is very good when compared with other solutions.

From what we have seen, it is a scalable solution. We started with about 20 licenses and ended up overusing them by 70 licenses when we got up to 90 email addresses. We later had to reduce that because it was over our licensing limit, but there was no problem in scaling at all.

Our client is a company with just one location and a fiber internet line. They have about 70 people using the internet.

The technical support is very good. One time, because of something we did, and not because the product failed, they were quick in resolving it. We made a support call and they said, "Okay, can we look at the machine?" We had to enable remote support and they could directly log in. After they logged in, they were able to quickly resolve it. It took about two hours after we placed the call, at the most, for them to get back to us and resolve the issue.

Compared to other solutions I've used, TitanHQ's support is very speedy. 

They are perfect.

Positive

We previously used Cisco IronPort. We switched because Cisco IronPort wasn't supported anymore and we would have had to buy a very expensive next-gen tool from Cisco. We didn't like that, so we looked for another solution.

We had a lot of spam coming in at a time when we were using a local Exchange Server and there was not really much we could do in a granular way. We were looking for a new solution that would filter the email more perfectly. We found that in SpamTitan.

I did the deployment. For an engineer, it's a fairly straightforward process. Once you install it, you get the proper tips for configuring it. It took me about half an to get us up and running and configuring took a bit longer. That was the fine-tuning. But setting it up, getting it to work, and placing it in between the internet and our email took just half an hour. It was very easy. You do need knowledge of networking and email routing, but that's it.

I was the only one involved in the deployment, and it requires just one person for maintenance. We keep to a monthly cycle of looking at the updates and we update if there are any, but it takes almost no effort to maintain it.

It has saved us a lot of management work. It's almost a fire-and-forget solution. There is some spam coming through, but that's just because the spam creators are also getting smarter. We have to tweak it a little or maybe update the system and, after that, it comes up roses.

Our most important return on investment is time because the solution has saved us a lot of time by not having to worry about emails coming in. The things that are coming in now, most of the time, are just right. Sifting through emails went from two hours to a few minutes.

The pricing is just right. There are no additional costs to the standard fee, as far as I know.

We looked at some open-source solutions but didn't find anything to our liking. When we came up with SpamTitan it was a bullseye. It was exactly what we needed. It's a complete package. 

With the open-source packages, you still have to do a lot yourself, whereas SpamTitan has a development organization behind it. Anything that needs to be in there is there. The setup is simple and I was configuring away after about half an hour. That was a big difference compared to the open-source solutions at the time.

We based our choice on the things TitanHQ said it could do. We installed it and it did everything they said it would do. It has saved a lot of effort and a lot of time.

Just do it. Make it a real-world example because once you have it set up and running, it runs just fine. It's a very good solution.

It's an eight out of 10 because the interface could be improved.

It allows me to help my clients prevent bad stuff coming onto their network. It does security spam filtering, searching where it came from and whether it is spam or whatever. It also scans attachments, URLs, and addresses in the emails, then puts it in a quarantine. It is part of the tools in my suitcase of things which can help my client keep their network clean.

We are using it at Arcadia Ambulance. Other clients that I have use it as well. Further usage is definitely on the horizon, as needed. It really depends on who wants to use it. Pricing can be a decider.

It provides insurance for cybersecurity, which is required for a lot of clients. There is peace of mind, knowing that their network will be a bit more secure.

Sometimes, sources considered spam try to attack the client who has put in a filter. I don't know what they are trying to do, as they might be violating SPF records or attempting DMARC DNS violations. This solution prevents that spam from coming in. The client can then see that in their digest on a daily basis.

The digest and the quarantine are the most valuable features. I can go into the quarantine and see everything that was quarantined. On an individual basis, you can easily whitelist an email or address coming in, if needed.

The user interface experience is easy and intuitive. I don't think I have ever run into a situation where I don't know how to do something or don't know where something is at, then calling up someone at SpamTitan. The product is a little more powerful and user-friendly now at Arcadia Ambulance, then when I used it as Arcadia Ambulance. 

SpamTitan is easy to navigate. It is in a format that the end user can understand. I don't really need to handhold clients who are using it. They understand it is very intuitive. If an email comes in, and they don't want that to come in, then they can block the email as an email that they don't want to receive. It is fairly easy for them to navigate and manage the spam filter service.

I am not sure it does URL filtering or checks for phishing, but if it does, then great. That would probably be my room for improvement. I would like it to check for DCIN violations from locations where the email is being sent. Also, I would like it to do sandboxing, e.g., if an attachment is on an email, then it opens that at a different location to ensure that file attachment does not have any malicious aspects to it.

There is some room for improvement. Some of the biggest ones are better scanning of emails coming from what source and scanning emails for the content in the email. For example, determining if the email has malicious content in it by scanning the email and attachment. If it does that, then great, but that is very important to my clients and me. It is very important that you know what is in an email before it gets into an office's location. Not only where it is coming from, but what is in it, which is probably more important than where it is coming from. It could be coming from a client's partner or a business that they work with, but what if they get compromised? The perpetrators or bad guys start sending emails to Arcadia Ambulance, and they are infected with scripts and bad stuff. They think, "Okay, this is a legit user," since they get emails from them all the time, then they get hit. That is how a lot of really bad stuff happens.

The stability of SpamTitan is equivalent to other email security solutions that I have previously used. Some of them have more bells and whistles that you can add. For example, inside the email subject line, you can put in the words encrypt secret, or secure. Then, it will automatically secure that email and send an email to the person who is supposed to receive it. They can identify it for themselves in a series of different Q&A questions. That is sometimes a deciding factor for clients.

I have used it in the past, quite a bit, at another company where the solution was sold. I was reselling it indirectly through another distributor and TitanHQ was hosting it on their server. That was different because Arcadia Ambulance is using it directly through TitanHQ.

It just gets it done. It could probably be improved with more options being provided. For example, being able to hold emails that come in for up to 30 days, so if an email is lost or whatever, you can go and read it again. Seeing emails for each individual is a feature that could be provided for both incoming and outgoing, almost like a cached copy of every email coming in and out.

There are 10 to 15 users using this solution. This includes finance, management, payroll, billing, and the assistance department. The assistance department assists in routing patients to their ambulance, e.g., where they will be picked up. They also address any issues that might come up, such as how long it will take the driver to arrive. It looks at traffic patterns and helps the ambulance get there, if they need help.

TitanHQ technical support is knowledgeable, but sometimes not accessible because they are a UK company. Sometimes when I need help, they might not be available to help me. I would rate them as eight out of 10.

The expertise, attentiveness, and speed of response from TitanHQ’s customer support team is pretty good compared to competing solutions’ customer support teams. It is equivalent.

Positive

Arcadia Ambulance previously didn't have anything. Therefore, when it came time to update their cybersecurity insurance, we helped implement SpamTitan, which met all the requirements. Before, it would sometimes go into the junk folder inside of Outlook.

It wasn't too difficult to set up and configure SpamTitan. I had to change the DNS, then configure and enable it for all the end users who would be using it. That wasn't very difficult at all. I actually did it by myself, then I had a conference call with a tech support person who double checked my settings and that my configuration was done correctly. So, it was fairly easy. It took about one or two hours.

I did have to talk to my boss at Arcadia and answer a few questions. Believe it or not, my email address was blocked so he had to unblock it.

I can make a lot of money reselling it. 

Partner profitability is good with Titan HQ's partner program. This means that I recommend it to clients who trust me. My time and effort to educate them is compensated by TitanHQ, who provides the solution to me at a lower price than what the public gets it at, then I can make some money.

My business is more secure. In which case, I am up all the time. I have fewer vulnerabilities, which is important. That is my return on investment for getting SpamTitan's spam filter. If I don't have it, then I could have large bills for resolving and correcting the damage that was done.

I just say, "The pricing is X amount per month and per mailbox."

TitanHQ is all over the world, and not all solutions are global. TitanHQ sees what is happening globally, adding to their experience and knowledge.

SpamTitan has helped improve my spam catch rate and reduce my false positive rate amongst the services that I use. For example, I use a firewall and most clients scan files, attachments, and data coming in and out. I don't use just one solution, but many different ones, so there is overlap.

I tell someone looking into this solution that it has a series of different security functions or features, then I inform them of other options out there.

Don't always assume that it does what you think it does. Clarify and ask questions. Ask if it can do other things besides the things that it currently does.

I would rate the solution as seven and a half out of 10.

We use it to protect our emails from spam, malware, viruses, as well as from attacks like spoofing.

We have seen a reduction in complaints from employees about spam, for sure.

Geo-blocking is a great feature. We like it. Every spam solution should have that kind of filtering. We don't work with African or Asian countries. We're mostly focused on North America. Blocking those regions helps a lot in protecting us from spammers who are trying to reach us. Before we implemented this feature, we saw a lot of spam coming from Vietnam, Russia, China, and India, et cetera. The geo-blocking has reduced spam a lot.

Another good feature, related to geo-blocking, is the ability to specify exemptions. We discovered that some of our customers, even though they are located in Canada, have an Exchange Server sitting in Japan or in the Netherlands. It seems they have branches or their head office in other countries. Having this exception feature is helpful.

The SpamTitan user interface is pretty straightforward. I don't see it as very complicated or difficult to navigate. It's very user-friendly. 

Within the reporting part, when you look at the history of the emails, it would help if it were more intuitive. If you don't know where it is, you have to go through many things to find it. Once you know, it's fine. It's only an issue at the beginning.

I would also like to see SpamTitan improve on its antivirus software. I believe they're using Bitdefender and ClamAV. A problem with them is that they sometimes miss Trojans and malicious sites. We have internal antivirus software as well, and when we receive emails we see that our local antivirus software has found Trojans in them. SpamTitan should find better solutions for the antivirus. What they have is not so bad but it's missing some things. Of course, no solution catches 100 percent of what's out there.

We have been using TitanHQ SpamTitan since 2018.

At first, we had an issue with the emails getting stuck in SpamTitan and getting old there. The emails were in a queue and didn't go out. It was a one-time issue but when I contacted support they fixed the issue and it has been working fine since then.

One thing that concerns me is that when they need to upgrade the version or the hardware, even though it's virtual machines, the unit becomes unavailable and during these kinds of maintenance, all emails stop. Other solutions have redundancy and, even as they do maintenance, it does not affect email at all.

The scalability is good. We purchased 500 licenses and then we increased the numbers because our company grew. If our company grows more, we'll add more licenses.

Their technical support is very responsible but, because of different time zone, sometimes the response is late. In the past, their response was slower but in the last year it has been much faster.

Their expertise is very good. The technical knowledge of SpamTitan's support is better than FortiClient's, for sure.

Maybe it's just the Canadian in me, but I would like it if SpamTitan's support were a little bit more friendly. They know their stuff but sometimes you feel they're not friendly. It's not all of them, but some.

Positive

We used to use FortiClient and Symantec Messaging Gateway. We didn't like Symantec's solution, but we switched because of the cost. SpamTitan was more cost-effective than either of the other solutions.

The difficulty level of the setup process is medium. You spend time understanding how it's set up and how it's configured. The hard part was understanding how we were going to switch to it and how we were going to: add the white lists and the black lists, do exceptions by IP and by domain. There are many things you need to consider.

It didn't take long to deploy. We did it really fast, within about a week. We prepared everything and then we switched one company and then another one.

When switching from one spam filter to another, you need to make sure the move goes smoothly. You run two spam filters at the same time and migrate everything.

There were a lot of false positives in the beginning. We had to tune it and manage and create exceptions. It was time-consuming to adjust everything and white-list a lot of things. It's better now but it's still catching some false positives.

We tried a few other solutions before, including FortiClient and, before I chose SpamTitan, I looked at many reviews online. One of the online suggestions I read was for SpamTitan because it does its job and it's a cost-effective solution compared to other products, like Barracuda and FortiMail. Also, the false positive rate in FortiMail was worse.

SpamTitan may not be one of the top products on the market but I think it's good enough, at least for us.