SpamTitan by TitanHQ Reviews

Pros
The ease of setup, the integration of Bitdefender sandbox, the punctuality of the spamfilter - after training -, the user quarantine, price tag, fast and quality(!) support. The quality of the checks and inclusion of bitdefender is a big extra. And I have to mention the support again: once we ran into a problem updating the software at a customer the speed of response and willing to help and solve the issue for us analyzing the system, etc was great ( The problem caused by our fault as we gave too few resources to the VM because we waited for more RAM to the virtual hosts and didn't upgrade the settings when we had enough resources again to run all workloads.) Support was willing to recover the system to be fully functional with a remote help.

Cons
Looking for logs about a specific message could be easier. While it's great and usable for an experienced admin this is a bit tedious for Level 1 support guys. However, there's a detailed description/howto page which covers all the details (https://helpdesk.spamtitan.com/support/solutions/articles/175885-using-history). I just mean that could be easier to follow a message and look for all occurrences in the logs.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
We opted for an on-site appliance (a Linux server really, a VM in our case, but it's just a web-based console as far as configuration goes). Their cloud version is the same product running on their servers and that would relieve you of the work we put in, as I'll describe, but we wouldn't have it any other way. The on-prem version is what we like the most about this "software." We have another VM running at an alternate site, they sync with each other and one can take over if the other is down or unreachable. They also can load-balance. Yes this solution is a little more complex than are previous solution. But it's in the complexity that you get the flexibility. SpamTitan support has helped us tweak the settings based on what we're seeing in the console. Excellent history report shows everything, or you can filter very easily. Unfiltered you can see blocked (and why), quarantined, accepted...everything. If you don't see it, that email did not get to you, and in our experience it has been a Sender issue every time. SpamTitan, with the clustered configuration is less that half the cost of our old solution and we never have to upgrade or replace the "appliance" because it's just a VM, or one of our physical servers, either way, you never face an End of Life "you must upgrade" mandate from SpamTitan. Also - these servers will spool email until they can reach the email server. So if your email server is down or unreachable, you most likely are still getting email.

Cons
Well...it does require us to do some of the lifting and I have discovered there was a lot I didn't know about fighting spam. I turned on one block setting and started blocking emails I didn't want to block, okay...turn that off! We had warned all of our employees that we were switching products and to be on the lookout for spam and/or missing emails. Most reports were false, but in some cases there was a problem with the settings and this helped us to tweak the product. Also be aware that you need to use a trusted IP address or your emails may end up in the recipient's spam folder. We just used the IP from our old solution once we ran into this issue. There are certainly other examples, things not working right because we didn't set it up just right (we tend to do things on our own, we learn more that way). Every time we've gotten stuck I have gone to the website and checked their knowledge base. If I didn't find the answer I create a ticket. If you give them a console-generated code they can get into your system and look at your settings. After a month or two I think we have the settings where we want them. However, we keep an eye on the history report, watching for any signs of trouble. The product worked well right out of the box, but now it's really doing a good job, without blocking good emails (yes, some bad emails get through, but it's at least as good as our old expensive managed solution).

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
Easy to setup and maintain. The detection rate is fabulous. When we initially setup the software we were getting tons of false-positives but this subsided after several weeks of use after which time I assume the system started to pickup on the types of emails that we consider legit.

Cons
It would be better to have a more well rounded user portal. For those users with many false-positives in an email notice it would be good to have a way to release the emails without opening a web browser tab for each and every email to be released or at least bring the user to the portal login page so they can easily manage many releases if this is not possible through the email client. Not a big deal but it is a little annoying personally for me. I believe in the beginning I was told that there was no user portal to then later find out that there was one. Not sure where the disconnect was but this feature ended up being quite crucial for the owner of the company I work for as he was used to working in the portal of our previous product (Barracuda). The other problem that was noticed earlier on is that the daily summary emails would have these crazy ambiguous email addresses in them in the "From" field which I was told couldn't be modified. The owner of the company was very confused by this as the Barracuda would show us both the technical from address as well as what would normally appear in the mail client and would have more meaning to the end user and give them a better idea if the email was spam or not. I suggested at the time to the tech\sales person I was speaking with that this should be changed to at least show both "from" email address' so the end user is armed with more information to make an informed decision about the email being spam or not.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 8/10

Pros
It's as close to "set it and forget it" as you can come in the IT field. Right out of the box support helped me set everything up in less than 20 minutes, no hardware to worry about, nothing like that. Literally all I have to do is check to see if something was blocked incorrectly once in a while, white list it, and done. I've been using spam titan for almost a year and in that time we have blocked over 200k spam/malicious emails for a 30 person company before they even hit employee mailboxes. I shut off the service for 48 hours just to make sure it easy legit, it was, and I haven't shut it off again since. Whitelisting and blacklisting domains and specific emails are super easy. Support Staff are awesome and go into detail when resolving problems if they were to arise or even if you just have a question. They have always been friendly and curteous and super personable and have been some of the best people to work with in all my years doing IT.

Cons
The only thing I feel is missing is the ability for cloud users to create their own key word filter. Don't get me wrong, the spam filter itself is amazing, just a bit more precise control on my end to mark specific phrases or words as spam would be nice. Being able to see the email body of messages that come in as SPF fails would be helpful at times as many company's we deal with have auto invoicing that fails SPF. Other than that no issues!

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
It has greatly reduced the amount of spam getting to my users. I hesitate to put a % to it for fear of being low, but I say 90% of the spam that use to get through is captured now. Not only that, but I can easily blacklist or whitelist specific addresses or domains. Something that was a painful process on my previous spamfilter platform. You can also pull metrics and reports to show how much mail has been processed and how much has been caught.

Cons
The setup process can take some time, but their support staff are very helpful and will get you through it. It is worth the setup pains for the filtering it provides though.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
After going through a fairly simple setup, SpamTitan just works. It does a great job of stopping most spam and has a small number of false positives. It is also pretty easy to set up notifications on any blocked emails to ensure that proper capture is occurring. One side feature that I really like is using the web interface to see what emails have been allowed through. Using that information, when a client calls and tells us they sent an email that we didn't get, I can immediately look on SpamTitan to see if the email reached our servers at all. This allows me to very quickly determine if an email that never reached us was blocked on by our servers or prior to reaching us at all.

Cons
If you change a filter in the web interface to return too many records, the site will sometimes hang. I have sent in questions for support once or twice, and I do get a reply very quickly that the staff will address my question, but I often never get a response after that.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
There are several advantages of using this software. Apart from being an anti-spam filtering solution, it also serves as a temporary archiving service when you need to take your mail servers down for maintenance. You will never lose an e-mail. Great tool to have if planning an e-mail migration to a cloud provider. No more appliances and almost zero configuration apart from relocating your MX records. Highly recommended.

Cons
The customer support is not that great. It always appears that you are dealing with the same person over a chat or report ticketing system. I am not so sure how many engineers are working in support but I always seem to work with the same person. It is really hard to get a remote session with an engineer, most of the time you only receive ticket replies with instructions to be followed and it feels like trial and error. Nevertheless, the software works perfectly so you rarely need to use support. It is for extremely irregular situations that you would contact support.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
1) virtual appliances 2) clusterable 3) support ldap/s 4) user specific CP

Cons
a) does not provide reporting of how many mailboxes each domain is using in a given month - being a multitenant system and we with many clients, we lost this ability to have emailed/automated reports of how many mailboxes are active in a given month under each domain. seems easy to code and would provide value b) really don't like how it handles aliases, treating them as unique 'accounts' c) still has the spamassassin feel, the best of breed from back in the day was postini d) really don't like that your appliance doesn't email us when it can't reach a downstream smtp target. sure we do snmp/wmi/pingdom monitoring for our key clients, but it's niceto have the edge system send an email/snmp trap when it cannot connect to a domain's downstream smtp server. agian, shouldn't be hard to code....

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 8/10

Pros
- The application is stable and requires little maintenance. - Support is responsive and knowledgeable - Cost is a good value and pricing structure allows for use with multiple domains to maximize licensing. - New email addresses are automatically learned to ease administration and automate licensing needs. - Good reporting - User self maintenance works well.

Cons
- Not really an issue for me, but there is no mobile admin client. - Web interface seems dated, which is not a concern of mine, but it could turn off some admins.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
The service as well as the products we use with TitanHQ have been rock solid since we started. We are an MSP so reliability and ease of use followed up by excellent responsive customer service are only magnified by the amount of clients that we use with TitanHQ. Currently we server over 500 individual users and no one has had a complaint. This has been a wonderful partnership so far and we will continue to use the. Right now we currently use ArcTitan and Spamtitan with much success.

Cons
There is not really anything to like about this company or the services they provide.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
My inbox can get pretty busy after a long day of meetings. If I don’t manage to clean them, it can clog up my emails. Once I go through these emails, I notice that majority of it is spam and junk which I don’t personally need. Blocking and moving to my spam folder is time consuming and I could do better things with that time. SpamTitan captured me from the moment I tried it and has never failed me so far. I can now manage my inbox and know that I don’t have to deal with malicious threats.

Cons
Sometimes SpamTitan can send important emails directly to the spam folder. I usually check my spam folder once a week just to make sure I didn’t miss anything. It’s very rare though.Sometimes SpamTitan can send important emails directly to the spam folder. I usually check my spam folder once a week just to make sure I didn’t miss anything. It’s very rare though.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
The interface is very responsive and easy to navigate. Installation was easy; regular updates are provides and also install very easily. Very few false positives.

Cons
No facility for custom scoring; mail is either 'good' and passes, or is 'bad' and is rejected. Many spam filtering system have a scoring system so that when particular conditions are met (key words in a subject or msg body, country of origin, time of day, bulk mail status, destination, sending TLD, etc), a cumulative score is created to determine spam status. Would love to have SpamTitan be able to add 'Posible spam' or some such to the subject so the mail server or user filters could pick it up.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 8/10

Pros
The software is easy to setup, pretty easy to use and navigate. It stopped most of our spam issue (using the SpamTitan Gateway), got rid of quite a bit of sent in viruses (rest caught from Exchange or local clients).

Cons
Reboots and updates sometimes caused the file system to get "corrupted", requiring some cmd line level programs to get it healthy again. Also had issue with how licenses were counted as we only have 35-40 employees but they have multiple email addresses (first.last, fnlast, etc) and it shows up as 150+ people, really wish it was mailbox linked and not address linked. Our biggest issue is not with the software, but with the company. They have stopped answering emails, stopped answering the phones. We have been trying for a month and a half to get support and its radio silence. We still have 18+ months left on our 3 year contract and are already looking for a new product with actual support.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 2/10

Pros
Setup is simple. Don't need much time to understand options or features, Menus and options are easy to navigate and find. When you need support they always answer fast. Is one of those things you setup and just forget about it.

Cons
System slows down quite often, nothing serious enough to regret in my case with only 110 email addresses to handle for reports and quarantine. Quarantine alerts/reports timeframes are too long even for the smallest business... I consider this its biggest flaw! as the shortest timeframe is daily. This should improve with a shorter or a programmable option offered globally and/or in a categorized list selectable by user or groups.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
What I like the most about this software is the fact it is an appliance that can run as a Virtual Machine. It highly simplifies the implementation of the product in any environment or architecture. It is easy to manage any internet domain and all the rules to them related. It supports more mail servers. It makes use of 2 different Anti-Virus to reduce the risk to let Viruses pass the appliance.

Cons
the outlook addin or the way for the user to manage their quarantine is not the easiest. it could be managed in a different way, especially for MS Exchange users.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
I like the value for money. The VM appliance doesn't consume much resources. Spam tagging is good, managing the interface is straightforward and works. The appliance is very very stable. It never crashed in the last 8 years. Updating is straightforward, questions sent to support are answered fast.

Cons
Managing and changing multiple domains could be a bit better. Changing several domains takes a bit of time. Export Import of a central config file would be a good option. When a new kind of spamming hits the market, Spamtitan does take a couple of days to react to that.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 8/10

Pros
In this day and age, acquiring an anti-spam software is an absolute necessity and not a luxury. I hate having to keep filtering my email and blocking the scammers out there. It can take a lot of time doing that and it’s better to have a software that can help you with that. I found SpamTitan to be ultimate choice and in dealing with this matters. It’s very straightforward and all it does is eliminates spam, protects you from viruses and fraudulent emails. I can spend more time working on my other tasks instead of filtering the spam. SpamTitan is a great investment.

Cons
I don’t have any problems with this software. It has made my workload so much easier and I don’t have to worry on any threats. I’m thankful for this software.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
Ease of use, the high percentage of spam caught the first time!

Cons
It has worked so well over the past year that I have forgotten the amount of time it took to initially set up our account. In reality, initial setup was so easy to do that I cannot say that I have an Cons to refer to.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
• Filters/Blocks 90% of Spam • Uses multiple Spam Filtering Technology • Blacklist/Whitelist can be set Globally and per User • Customization Spam Inbox Report • Has a Scan Summary/Performance Report • Web UI loads quickly • Updates are easy and quick to apply within the UI

Cons
• Difficult to improve the filtering technology without creating false positive • Doesn't have a help feature available for each setting • New Spam techniques are difficult to catch immediately • Doesn't have an Artificial Neural Learning Network that learns from identified User/Admin Flagged Spam

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 8/10

Pros
A very good anti-spam filter with a lot of options. Suitable for any mailserver (I use it with a linux-based mailserver, but you can use it with Exchange as well). From time to time upgrades are available. These updates are running smoothly, I never had problems with it. We use spamtitan for 5 years now, we had only one actual problem during this period. That problem was solved quickly by the spamtitan helpdesk.

Cons
As from version 7, they've replace Kaspersky anti-virus gateway by Bitdefender. In my opinion, Kaspersky had a higher virus detection and worked better. There is also an extra free anti-virus gateway "Clamav", but that one I had to disable because of some troubles.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
I have always been confident with my email management skills and I was comfortable with how everything was. Traffic and spam messages increased as my incoming emails increased. I installed SpamTitan and noticed that unnecessary emails were nowhere to be found. It worked silently in the background. It helped me a lot especially in managing my emails and determining junk mails. It transferred non-important emails to a folder which I can browse on if I have more time.

Cons
The system often crashes when being refreshed, also it seems like “treatment” or putting of emails in “quarantine” needs more updates. I had an important email that was thought to be a spam, good thing I looked.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
No more need for sender based routing on our Exchange Servers, SpamTitan takes care of this automatically. Logfiles are instantly available, in our old solution we had to wait about half an hour. Great virus filtering with Bitdefender.

Cons
It's not possible to send outbound mail with smtp authentication, only ip authentication is supported. For customers on a dynamic ip it's useless. I would prefer to be able to login with 2FA on the webinterface, but this is not (yet) possible. Our clients receive (a bit) more spam then with the old solution. The initial configuration to set the best settings is confusing. It's maybe too flexible. We use the gateway version, I would like to use the same settings as SpamTitan on the hosted solution, which I'm sure is optimized as good as it can be. Some configuration settings, like ip blacklisting (which looks to be very effective) are configured on our cluster only. I think this could be far more effective if you could use a central blacklist from SpamTitan. In general I think it's great, but configuration could be better if more is centralized.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 8/10

Pros
Has great filter to stop all spam. Has really nice quarantines section and can email users to show them emails that been quarantined . Easy to setup like the option to run it on your own server. Can scale it across servers if you need to. Its easy to setup whitelists and blacklists.

Cons
You can archive your emails but that not really a big con.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
I count on the protection and support of Spamtitan when it comes to my business and my customers. When it was first used with my hosted mail services, it was during a time when particular crypto-ransomwares were causing significant issues with my customers. Once I switched, problem solved and ironically, it was at that time that only my customers that did not utilize my Spamtitan solution continued to have issues.

Cons
The creation of an Microsoft Outlook Add-in module for Spam management would enhance the solution significantly. It has cost me some business as some of Spamtitan's competitors have this in use.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
I like the ease of use and the simple steps to get up and running. The effectiveness of the filtering is really good. I do not have many if any emails categorized as spam that aren't spam. It takes a week or two for the system to get tuned. All the users are happy with it and that simplifies my life too. The report system is nice and the option to be able to generate or change settings directly from the previous report email is perfect.

Cons
I would have like a way to easily select email in my exchange box and set them as spam.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10