TitanHQ SpamTitan Reviews

We are a managed service provider, and many of our customers have email on-premises with Microsoft Exchange Servers or through cloud-based services like Microsoft 365. They weren't satisfied with built-in spam filtering, received too many spam emails, and suffered from phishing attacks etc. This highlighted the need for a robust anti-spam solution for us to roll out for our clients, and we decided to go with TitanHQ SpamTitan. We've had a good relationship since then, and they cloud host our instance of SpamTitan; it's otherwise managed by us internally.

I don't think that's sort of in the scope of this type of product. So no, I don't think it really applies.

I like that advanced features such as DKIM signing are integrated into SpamTitan. It works well, and setting up DKIM can be cumbersome for many email servers, particularly with Microsoft Exchange. DKIM signing verifies the sender's authenticity by applying a signature to outgoing emails, and it was straightforward to set up within the solution.

TitanHQ support is very helpful and responsive. When we wanted to make changes, needed assistance customizing the solution, or had any concerns, they are there for us, and that's a key feature.

When clients approach us looking for tech services, we put together a proposal to address their needs, and if those include email security and anti-spam, we pitch SpamTitan. The price is per user, and we set up the solution in front of the client's email service. The product filters all incoming and potentially outgoing emails, allowing only the clean ones through. 

We appreciate how customizable and flexible the solution is. It allows us to operate how we want, especially as we have our own instance. We have two of them in a cluster for redundancy, and we can go in and make whatever changes we require with no problems. 

We have a good partner relationship with our TitanHQ sales rep. They are very responsive in terms of support; our concerns are taken seriously and resolved appropriately. We are an SMB and work primarily with other SMBs, so vendor relationships and trust are essential to us. When partnered with a gigantic company, there is a risk of our voice going unheard when we have complaints, which hasn't happened with TitanHQ. 

Regarding filtering emails, we have two main requirements: reducing the spam cluttering users' inboxes and, more importantly, filtering out malicious emails containing viruses, malware, phishing attacks, etc. The product has done a great job filtering those out, and when it comes to security, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. The consequences of a malicious email getting through are potentially very severe, and the system could be compromised. 

It can be hard to quantify as users aren't even aware of the viruses, malware, and phishing emails SpamTitan rejects before reaching their mailboxes. I'm sure it's saving employees' time, as just one malicious email can cost a significant amount of productivity. If someone's account is compromised, even if there are no other adverse effects, we still need to reset their credentials and multi-factor authentication. The more significant concern of an account being compromised is data leakage; if a bad actor got in and saw our emails, what sort of information can they glean from that, and how can they use it? We saw cases before we started to use SpamTitan, or in our clients who don't use the product, where malicious actors got in and were able to run financial scams because they could get into the emails and see invoices being sent to customers. Preventing these situations is one of the key selling points of the solution, and it has increased our spam catch rate and reduced the number of false positives. 

The authentication functionality could be improved. We liked having a single sign-on approach in that our customers could use the same username and password for their workstation, email, and spam filter. That integrates very well in an on-premise environment. Microsoft has since moved away from some of its legacy authentication methods, so it's no longer possible for our clients to use the exact login details for SpamTitan and Microsoft 365. SpamTitan has yet to introduce modern authentication methods. Although we can use the solution's native multi-factor authentication, it isn't compatible with Microsoft 365's MFA, requiring the use of different usernames and passwords. It would be great if TitanHQ could improve that to be compatible with modern authentication. 

There is room for improvement in automation; better wizards for deployment, for example.

We have been using the solution since April 2019, and we've filtered over 20 million emails for our customers.

We've had one major outage since 2019, where one of our nodes was taken down, and the other was impacted, but not entirely down. We needed support to get up and running, but the solution is 100% stable apart from that occasion. It's not perfect, but no cloud service is, and I would say that one issue over three years of use makes SpamTitan a highly reliable product.

I'd say the stability is comparable with other solutions. When we were with Roaring Penguin, there were one or two outages over a similar period. No product is up 100% of the time. When cloud services go down, we feel it because there isn't anything we can do, but SpamTitan has very high uptime, and I think most cloud services have very high uptimes.

We haven't had any scalability issues; our two nodes have handled all the traffic we're throwing at it, so we haven't had to scale beyond our initial deployment. TitanHQ manages that for us, and we don't have to pay any mind to scale resources in terms of CPU and RAM. At one point, they may have increased logging disk space. Other than that, there has been no need to scale.

I rate them a 10 out of 10. The support isn't 24/7, so tickets submitted on the weekend may not be answered until Monday, and there is a time difference as they are based in Ireland. We brought this up with our rep, and they gave us a direct line to get support from a technician in urgent scenarios. We used that once and woke the technician up on the other end. TitanHQ always adequately addressed our concerns; they took the step to make up for the issues we raised about the availability of technical support, which is very valuable. 

Positive

We have a large customer base, so we inherit the different solutions that come with them; that's a lot of different products. We had clients using Microsoft 365's built-in spam filter, GFI MailEssentials, and other on-premise solutions, so we became familiar with these products. As an MSP, we don't necessarily dictate our customers' solutions. We provided firewalls with email filters from a vendor called eSoft, then acquired by Untangle, and an anti-spam solution by Roaring Penguin Software. They were purchased by N-able, which shut down the service and pushed for our clients to move to Mail Assure. We were satisfied with Roaring Penguin and didn't like Mail Assure, which triggered our search for a new solution to offer our customers. There was also an internal goal to standardize in our company, to focus on one solution.

We chose SpamTitan because it was closer to what we were used to with Roaring Penguin; it was cleaner and more straightforward than the other products. Mail Assure, for example, had a confusing interface, so we went with SpamTitan as our first cloud-hosted solution.

We went with the cloud-hosted solution, so we didn't have to install anything, TitanHQ deployed it for us in the sense that they configured the environment.

In terms of deployment between my company and our customers, it's straightforward. There are just a few steps to add a new customer: adding their domain, adding the point where the mail is going, configuring the settings according to their requirements, and documenting the process. It only took us a few deployments to become very proficient at it. However, some automation, especially in the form of a deployment wizard to assist in setup, would be a welcome improvement.

There is always a tradeoff between feature-rich products and ease of configuration or complexity of setup. I would say SpamTitan is a happy medium, there are a lot of settings and a corresponding learning curve, but the documentation and support are there to make that process smooth. The UI is also user-friendly and straightforward, with little help buttons and question marks to click for more details. Configuration isn't any more difficult than I would expect with a feature-rich, complex product. Especially a spam filtering solution as it's such a cat and mouse game, it's never going to be one-size-fits-all. Our customers have widely differing requirements, so customization is vital. 

The maintenance is very light. The only maintenance requirements are occasional configuration backups and upgrades and version upgrades. Those consist of clicking install, next, and done, so maintenance is simple.

Any security solution is generally a good return on investment, whether it's spam filtering, antivirus, firewalls etc. We can't be sure what we have been protected from and what may have happened if we didn't have the protection SpamTitan provides.

The pricing and licensing are acceptable. The licensing is somewhat different; TitanHQ gives us a peak cap of simultaneous users, which they calculate as the number of email addresses viewed through so many days or weeks. That's considered our number of users, but it isn't always a one-to-one relationship, making it harder to resell. We can't say precisely that the solution costs X per month per user, but that's how we present the price to potential customers, and we just ensure we receive more than we pay to TitanHQ. The licensing hasn't caused us any problems, but it would be better if the pricing were per-user. I know that's not easy to achieve on a technical level.

We looked at the N-able Mail Assure solution and a Barracuda spam filtering product. We did the sales calls, received demos, and got quotes for pricing, but the SpamTitan UI won it for us.

I would rate this solution a 10 out of 10. 

We implemented the geo-blocking feature due to concerns coming out of Ukraine and Russia, so we decided to geo-block emails from that part of the world. Unfortunately, this isn't the product's fault; it didn't work for our customers because they had legitimate vendors or partners in that region. We had to turn the feature off because it interrupted our customers' business. That is not to say geo-blocking isn't a good feature; it just hasn't been compatible with our customers' needs. I can see how this feature could be handy in the future. 

I would advise reading the documentation and reaching out to support if you need any help. They're very helpful.

We use it for spam. Our biggest concern has been malware. Spam is a nuisance, but malware could be very damaging to our systems, and losing data just wasn't an option for us. It is that security side. The actual spam piece is probably secondary in my mind. Spam was certainly an inconvenience because of user complaints, but filtering out malware was huge for us. I would rather stop these things at the perimeter than rely on a local computer's antivirus.

We use it for exactly what it is supposed to be for. We use it for filtering out any malware that has been sent via email. For your truly obvious spam, I would rather put that out on the edges so end users don't have to see that junk in their junk mailbox. For some reason, being a college, the amount of spam we get is unbelievable. I would rather not overload users with too many things in their junk folders from Outlook. It just cuts down on the amount of noise that end users have to deal with.

We are a college. We are primarily a Windows shop, though we do have some Macs internally. Our servers are Windows-based. We have two locations. However, that whole idea of locations has gotten pretty fuzzy, not only with the cloud, but with the emphasis on remote work. The nice thing is that it filters mail before it even comes into our mail server and it doesn't matter where somebody is. They could be on campus at either one of our locations, or they could be at home, and SpamTitan will do what it is supposed to do.

It achieves a design goal that we have for in-depth defense.

We have had no cases of malware slipping through since we have had SpamTitan.

At times, I have used the geo-blocking feature. There are some hostile countries for whom I try to filter out traffic, be it through email or the perimeter firewall. We have to be careful with it, but it is good for cutting down on the amount of noise that we have to sort through.

The geo-blocking feature has worked well. Certainly some of that stuff can be spoofed, so it is not going to be 100%.For that really spammy spam, a lot of times the spammers don't even try to hide where they are originating from. For that, it has been good. There are a handful of countries that we just consider hostile, so being able to block those has been a good thing.

The geo-blocking feature seems to work fine for allowing exemptions based on a trusted sender's IP, domain, or email address. We haven't had any issues with it.

Over time, you set up additional filters, change the sensitivity level, and set up exceptions. The exceptions are powerful, so we don't accidentally filter out emails from a party that we work with. That has been great. 

It could be improved a little bit on the speed side. When I am trying to troubleshoot a mail message that somebody is looking for in SpamTitan, sometimes setting up the filters for the quarantine is a little bit pokey.

I have been using it for 10 years.

I haven't had to do upgrades. Anything that happens is done by the SpamTitan team, and it just stays up and running.

There have been no concerns in regards to stability. It just works. We haven't experienced any downtime with it. There have been no problems.

We are a small institution, so it certainly meets our needs. For us, it has been fantastic.

The technical support has been great. I haven't needed a lot of technical support, but the few times that I have reached out to them, they have answered quickly. I would rate them as 10 out of 10. 

The biggest thing for me to compare it to would be Microsoft. I much prefer dealing with SpamTitan because they are smaller. They are more responsive than some of the larger companies that we have worked with.

Positive

We tried some local things that were local to the computer itself, and typically a part of the anti-malware software. We found the performance hits were unacceptable and the filtering wasn't that good. It didn't satisfy that desire to filter those things out before getting to the user's computer. So, we did use other products, but they just weren't a good option for us.

SpamTitan has been much better than the Exchange Server competing product that we previously used, which would interfere with our backups of the Exchange Server. So, that had to go immediately. We were then depending on endpoint protection, which was just a terrible hit to us from a performance standpoint. Whereas, architecturally, SpamTitan does exactly what we want it to do. It is on the edge of our network, doing its job before anything even comes to our mail server.

SpamTitan was our very first spam filter. We were using an in-house Exchange Server, which didn't have viable filtering. We saw an ad for SpamTitan and brought it in, and it solved our problem. Later on, we did migrate away from an in-house mail service to Microsoft 365. While Microsoft's spam filtering is very good, I am not a big fan of trusting a single technology for something like security. I prefer the defense in-depth approach. 

Now, SpamTitan is more of a perimeter filtering system. What we primarily hope to get from it, and have been getting from it, is filtering out malware sent via email from the most egregious spam. We then let Microsoft be an additional layer after SpamTitan.

SpamTitan has absolutely helped save employees’ time by not having to sort through junk and spam emails. We first brought it in when we had the in-house mail solution and certain users were getting 300 to 400 spam emails a day. That was just a huge burden. Almost instantly, SpamTitan cut that down by well over 90%, even with the out-of-the-box tuning. That was a huge savings.

Even after we migrated to a cloud-hosted mail solution through Microsoft, it gives us that design goal of not trusting just one vendor's product for security.

The initial deployment was very easy. Basically, we just changed our MX records, and a minute or two later, it was working. It was very easy to deploy. 

It was very important to us that the setup and configuration were easy. Being a small school, we don't have a big staff for things like this. At the time that we brought it in, there was just one other person (a technician) and me. 

When there is a full range of IT services that we need to offer, I can't have a product that ties us up too much. So, SpamTitan has been easy to work with.

The SpamTitan team just walked us through it. There wasn't much to it because it was easy to work with.

Our ROI is excellent. Technically, we don't have to have it. Microsoft does an excellent job, but SpamTitan is so inexpensive that it is worth having that extra layer of defense. We just get a lot of peace of mind from having it.

We have considered dropping SpamTitan just to save little money on the budget. However, we thought through the cost of having a breach coming through email. There are certainly other attack avenues, but as far as email goes, SpamTitan is a bargain. It is using a different build entity than Microsoft uses, and I like having less of a monoculture when it comes to security.

The pricing and licensing have been very fair. I can't complain.

Because we are a small school, the cost is an issue for us. SpamTitan was much more affordable than some of the other solutions.

Overall, it is a great product. It is simple. It just does what it is supposed to do. We just haven't had issues with it.

Every now and then, I check and see if we have a false positive or add some geo-filtering. I will use the edge filtering at times, but I wouldn't call that maintenance. I will add exceptions if we bring on a new partner, then I will make sure that their stuff is whitelisted.

I would rate SpamTitan as 9.5 out of 10. I am just going to take off half a point for the performance issues at times. Not all the time, but sometimes when I am setting up filters to try to sort through the spam in the quarantine. Sometimes that gets a little bit pokey, but honestly, it has better performance than what I get out of Microsoft.

If you are looking for something where this solution is the first thing that scans your mail before it even goes through your mail server, then it is an outstanding option. I would highly recommend it with no reservations.

We really do love SpamTitan. It just works. It is simple, and I don't have to think about it. 

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.

We use it for spam filtering.

The fact that you're able to customize the program on an individual basis has been very helpful. That means I don't have to get involved with blocking certain things unless they are a common denominator among all our employees. If something keeps showing up, I'll get several requests to block it company-wide. Otherwise, the users can get in there and do their own thing and I don't have to worry about it.

It has definitely saved employees' time by not having to sort through junk and spam emails. We've turned it off a few times because we were having some issues or we had to change our mail server and, all of a sudden, people would say, "I got 50 spam messages." SpamTitan is definitely doing its job. It is probably 20 to 25 percent more effective than our previous solution.

SpamTitan is catching a little more than SonicWall did. It's about 10 to 15 percent more effective in that aspect. And the fact that it's a little more customizable has certainly made it a better solution.

It has also reduced our false positive rate by that same 10 to 15 percent. Nothing is perfect. You're always going to have a few that get through or that get blocked when you don't want them blocked. You just have to watch it and teach it. The longer we've been using it, the more refined we've been able to get it.

It gives our users the chance to interact with the program. They can decide if there are things that are junk mail that they don't want to be messing with, on an individual basis. Of course, I can always override that or control it from a company standpoint.

We use the geo-blocking feature to block a few countries, but for the most part, we leave most of them open. We deal with manufacturers that have office locations and factories in many countries, including Russia and China. But we'll block something like Afghanistan because we're not getting any business from Afghanistan. The geo-blocking may not have reduced our spam significantly, but it does block some.

I've been using TitanHQ SpamTitan for just about a year.

It's extremely stable. We've never had a failure such as their servers going down or anything like that.

It's probably very scalable for a larger company. I really only know it from our small company standpoint, but it would appear that it would work for a company of tens of thousands.

We changed to a new mail server and we had some issues getting SpamTitan working on the new one, from a traffic standpoint, IP-wise. It wound up being a port that we needed to open up that wasn't open. I went back and forth a couple of times before we finally figured out what the problem was, but once it was fixed it worked fine.

The engineer I was working with was obviously very knowledgeable and thorough, but he was probably used to dealing with IT people who deal with this stuff a lot more frequently and spend a lot more time with it than I do. Sometimes, they need to dumb it down a little bit and talk to their audience. They shouldn't assume that everyone is a subject matter expert.

My experience with SonicWall's support was pretty similar, although I've had fewer problems to deal with using SpamTitan than I did with SonicWall.

Positive

We were having problems with spam. We were using SonicWall and they had issues with a release that they brought out last summer. It wouldn't work with our server and software combination. They tried and tried and then I got tired of waiting for them to fix it. I went hunting, came across SpamTitan, and it seemed like a good fit. We've been using it since then.

With SpamTitan, our users have more access to their spam email than they were used to. We were limited with SonicWall. If you didn't get to your spam within three days, it was gone and you couldn't figure out what you missed. If you were on vacation, sometimes that would be a problem. SpamTitan doesn't have that problem as it can store stuff for a longer period of time. I believe it holds emails for 30 days. I can change that as an administrator, but I also have to be aware of the amount of junk mail that people get. Spam can really fill up a server pretty quickly, so you don't want to keep it around too long.

A frequent problem with SonicWall, because of that three-day limit, was that once a user had passed that, I had to get involved. If a customer wrote to one of our employees saying, "Hey, did you get my email?" I'd have to go find it. I don't have that same problem anymore. It has been greatly reduced.

In terms of the amount of time required to sort through unwanted junk and spam emails, SonicWall and SpamTitan are similar. You still have to go through your email and see which ones are junk. SpamTitan might be a little quicker because of how often it reports back.

SpamTitan is also an improvement over the SonicWall solution from a filtering standpoint. It is a win-win. In some ways, it was nice SonicWall did fail because we have a better solution now.

We had to disable the SonicWall version, which wasn't hard to do. Then we had to insert SpamTitan into the picture. It took a little bit of time, but not that much. It isn't something I do every day. I'm not an IT guy who deals with that on a regular basis.

It was pretty much straightforward, with a couple of minor issues. We couldn't get it to work and it turns out we had some bad IP numbers. They had given us an older version from the demo and they said, "Oh, we should have given you new ones when you bought the product." That was a minor glitch. Their support was good over the phone and they got me pointed in the right direction and it's been working since.

We discussed hosting SpamTitan in-house, because we had SonicWall in-house, but in this case the cloud solution seemed to be a better fit for us.

It requires very little maintenance. In the early stages it was more because we were refining the program and what it was filtering and not filtering. Now, there are probably weeks that I don't even look at it. There are times when I'll get a comment from one of our users who says, "Hey, can you do this?" or "I'm having a problem," and I might look at it then. But if I spend 15 minutes on it in a week, that's a lot of time, at this point.

We do see a return on our investment. It's not a lot of money, but we do get some return because people aren't wasting their time with junk mail and I'm not wasting my time trying to filter out more things because users are able to do that on their own.

One user is the same price as 50 users and there isn't a discount until you get to about 500 users. From a small business point of view—we're 30 people—there should be a price break before you have 500 people. Small businesses don't have a lot of money.

I looked around on the internet. There wasn't a particular solution I was looking at. I read a review about SpamTitan and that's the one I remembered. I liked what I read, it seemed pretty straightforward, and that's what we went with.

I looked at Proofpoint and a few other things, but a lot of them are designed for companies that are very large or at least medium sized. We're a small company and I wasn't going to spend tens of thousands of dollars. We don't have that in our budget for spam filtering, and SpamTitan was a lot more affordable.

We really haven't been looking at anything else, because we've been happy with the product. I like it and we're up for renewal and we will be renewing it. You're not going to renew it if you don't like it.

We have a business in which all of our users have email accounts. SpamTitan is an email gateway and it checks for spam, as the name implies, but it also checks for viruses and phishing emails to help stop them. We use it to help keep our company's email safe.

I get the same or even fewer number of requests from users about email, per month, and those requests have more to do with something having been quarantined, as opposed to whether something is a phishing email.

SpamTitan does a good job of grabbing all the newsletters and other things that come through. It saves a little bit of headache for our employees.

It has a quarantine bank where it keeps emails that it believes are spam so that users can access and retrieve them if need be, and say they're not spam.

It works as it should. It allows users to manage emails that they receive, meaning they can set up whitelists and blacklists. 

I have an administrative panel to globally add whitelist or blacklist entries. Also, if I need to look for an email that was quarantined because a user isn't sure how to access it, I have the ability to look into everyone's quarantine and take some kind of action on them, such as delivering them. We usually deliver them to the employee instead of them having to wait for the spam report.

The big issue that I've had is that the length of time that an email is kept in quarantine is only seven days and, in some cases, it is not even seven days. For example, on Monday this week, someone reported she had received some automated messages on Friday night. But by Monday, because it was a DMARC, she couldn't retrieve them and I couldn't find them either. It's great that it grabs things, but I wish that I could tune things more. Perhaps I could have a second quarantine area. Maybe users wouldn't need to access things older than seven days, but if I had a 20-day or 30-day repository, if someone came to me and said, "Hey, I can't get this back," I could end up getting it to them from the archive. 

That would make my life a lot easier because there have been a few times over the last year when someone has come to me and I said they haven't been able to retrieve an email because it had been simply deleted.

Even if it went into some type of cold storage, so it wouldn't cost much, it would give me a way to access them, if need be, even if it took 24 hours for me to access them.

Another feature that would be nice would be a button in Outlook to be able to report something as spam so that the system could learn. If an email doesn't get reported as spam and comes through, there's no way to tell it that it is spam. That type of button is important for that feedback because it improves the algorithm. They are working on a button but it still hasn't been implemented.

I have been using TitanHQ SpamTitan for a little over a year.

I haven't had any issues with the stability.

Their technical support is pretty good. I don't think I've had to wait more than half an hour or an hour for them to get back to me. They don't have live phone support, rather it's an email ticket system, but the nice thing is that you can look at any of your past tickets. So, if you run into an issue that you had before, it's pretty easy to do.

I haven't had to contact them that much except for when I have been trying to access an email that has been deleted, and there's not much they can do then. But overall, it just works.

Positive

The reason I looked into a gateway was that, in the same month, I received a number of questions about phishing emails, or emails with attachments. The people didn't know who they came from. Going with SpamTitan was one of a number of things I did to combat that.

We didn't have a previous solution, other than Microsoft's spam folder. That does an okay job for free, but it was not on this level.

I did the setup that makes SpamTitan the intermediary, so emails go to them first, and then to Office 365. The initial setup wasn't too difficult and if I had any questions, a sales engineer was there to help. She knew enough about the product to help me with any of the questions that I had.

The overall project included identifying the need, getting buy-in from the company, and then the search for potential suppliers. I had questions for all of them to figure out which one would be the best fit. Once we decided on SpamTitan, it was just a matter of looking over their instructions. They have a setup page on their website and they linked me to that.

The instructions could be changed a little bit. It took me a couple of takes to read through them because they have both onsite and cloud. There were a couple of settings that were a little bit unclear as to which one they were for, but you could eventually figure it out.

I did the setup myself. Once we purchased it, the installation was done within a day, including reading the instructions, going through the process, and then testing it afterward.

We renewed SpamTitan, so I think the company does see the benefit.

We're satisfied with the pricing and licensing for SpamTitan. They worked with us on that, because, fully staffed, we have around 110 people which would have required that we purchase 200 seats from them. But because we're a non-profit, they said 100 is fine, and if it fluctuates up or down, they're not going to hold us to it. They were really understanding about our issues with cost.

I looked at Barracuda, Mimecast, and a couple of others, but SpamTitan provided all the features that we needed, and it was cost-effective. The second choice would have been Barracuda, which had all of the features that we needed, plus a lot of the features that we wanted. SpamTitan couldn't provide everything that I wanted, but at least it handles the security part.

At this point, SpamTitan doesn't filter email between Office 365 users. It filters email that's coming in, but if somehow one of my clients gets a virus, it could be sent out to everyone in the company and that wouldn't go through SpamTitan. For example, if it's a Zero-day attack, SpamTitan may not know right off the top that it's a virus. The virus companies might not know yet that it's a Zero-day and it could get through. But Barracuda looks for suspicious activity in accounts that are sending emails to each other. If an account that doesn't normally blast emails out to everyone starts doing that with attachments, that will look fishy to Barracuda and it can stop it or identify it. That can help stop issues from happening.

That was one of the only things Barracuda does that spam Titan doesn't.

I'm not sure if it does a great job in terms of false positives, but it's easy to remedy if there are any. It doesn't happen that often, but I don't know if that's due to our users not going outside of our ecosystem that much, or something else. But, at least in the report section, you can see what the email scored, and that can give you an idea of why it was flagged.

It can be a little bit annoying to the user, at times, because they have to take another step to get some of their emails. But they understand the importance of the solution. There are a few hindrances now and then, but for the most part, it's very good.

It's a great first security gateway to try out, unless you know what you want, especially if cost is a factor.

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.

Our clients typically use Office 365 and Google as email providers, and we implement the solution to provide an additional layer of security for incoming emails. It helps with SPF, DMARC, and all the DNS tracers.

One of the main aspects of our business is security; firewalls, web application controls, anti-spams, and so on. We use TitanHQ SpamTitan for some clients in Peru.

As a service provider, we used and tested many brands including Proofpoint Email Protection and Fortinet FortiMail. We like to stick with SpamTitan for anti-spam, because it gives us the least problems and less false positives compared to other solutions. 

Spoofing prevention is critical. Using the solution as an outgoing filter prevents spoofing, a major issue right now as everyone is getting spoofing emails. The filter for incoming emails works well, perhaps even too well. SpamTitan works with a scoring system; sometimes, we need to adjust the score threshold to allow safe emails through manually. The filter can be a little too much, though it's better to be safe than sorry.

The way we can customize filters is excellent. Other solutions tend to be restrictive with their specific profiles, but with SpamTitan, we can create them from scratch.

The solution is straightforward to deploy and very quick to set it up. We can get it to work in five to ten minutes, which is excellent for demonstrating the product to potential clients. Another main factor is the price. I believe it's usually less expensive than all the other solutions.

There was an event two or three months ago where one of our clients had a problem where their domain was spoofed. We solved it by running the outgoing emails through SpamTitan and using the DMARC register. They stopped receiving spoofing emails, which is how we usually solve these problems. 

The solution doesn't just save us time, but money as well. We had a case with one client where their accounting department received spoofed emails requesting all kinds of payments. When we implemented the DMARC configuration for outgoing emails, they were protected. Regarding saving time going through spam emails, I would say an average amount of time is saved because anti-spam isn't the main focus of the solution. Our clients already use Office 365 and Google, which include spam filters for incoming emails. Our primary use for SpamTitan is security, the filter for incoming emails regarding buyers. Anti-spam is a bonus, but we care about security the most, and in terms of security, I would say SpamTitan performs above average. Since implementing the solution, we have received less complaints of false positives from our clients.

I believe the product is configured for the US or European market, not the Latin American market, and the scoring system is a little too strict for our market. Most companies in Latin America don't even have proper domain configuration, which can cause their emails to be filtered as spam. They might not have DMARC or SDF configuration, so we often have to change the scoring threshold to let legitimate emails through. It's not SpamTitan's fault, but the optimization isn't the greatest considering our market.  

We have been implementing this solution for our clients for four years. 

The stability of the solution is excellent; we only had one critical event in the past four years. SpamTitan uses two AVs, and we had an issue with one of them called BitDefender, which gave us false positives for about a week. 

For email solutions, stability is vital. If emails don't get through, it's a significant problem. SpamTitan is excellent in this department, as it prevents those problems, and so are the other cloud providers in the anti-spam segment. 

The scalability of the solution could be improved. We can go with a shared node or our own node, which offers a lot more scope for configuration. It would be great to switch between the two without downtime, which isn't possible now. I understand why this could be difficult to deliver, but it would still be an excellent feature to see.

I dealt with support through tickets and over the phone. They pick up the phone, which is great. Other providers get back to me within 24 hours, but SpamTitan is usually quicker if it's within working hours. There may be a few hours a day where they don't offer phone or email support, but that's very late at night and early in the morning. When I speak with their technical support, I get the impression they know what they are talking about, which isn't always the case with other providers.

Positive

We used many solutions of this kind, including Fortinet FortiMail and Proofpoint Email Protection. If the client wants an on-premises solution, we implement FortiMail, but that is more of a licensing issue. With an on-premises set-up, the pricing is based on the volume of emails per hour, whereas with cloud-based solutions, the price is based on the number of users or mailboxes. For all cloud-based solutions, we use SpamTitan.

The deployment is straightforward; we change our MX records and do the backend configuration. This is very helpful when we need to demo the product to clients, as we can set it up within 15 minutes. The setup only requires one person, me and maybe another engineer, but one is enough. 

All anti-spam solutions require some tweaking post-deployment. In our case, we often carry out a deployment and track it for the first week because every client has different providers and use cases. For huge clients, that tracking time can increase to a month. 

The solution gave us an ROI. The spam filters save us a lot of time, and the antivirus is excellent. We carried out a test in which SpamTitan detected a virus that other solutions didn't, and the DMARC configuration is great for preventing spoofing. This product saves us both time and money.

Cloud-based solutions charge per mailbox, which isn't ideal sometimes. A company could have 300 total mailboxes and only 50 in regular use, but they would have to pay the same for all of them. I want a cloud-based solution that gives a price based on the volume of email traffic.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use SpamTitan in the cloud. I believe they have different deployment options, but we only use the cloud solution.

I would love a cloud-based solution that offers the option of volume-based pricing rather than user-based. There are companies and especially government institutions that have 1000 mailboxes but only use 50 or 100 of those on a daily basis. In this scenario, a cloud-based anti-spam solution is very costly.

We don't use the solution's geo-blocking feature at the moment, as we don't require it. 

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.