SpamTitan

Commentaires: Overall, we are very happy with the product and the customer support. We did have to put some time into this product but now we have a custom-fit solution, with fault-tolerance (two servers at two locations, both locations have both internet and private WAN access to the Exchange server) and we're saving thousands of dollars versus the managed solution we used to use. We can tighten things up if we wish, we have a lot of flexibility with this product. I rate it an excellent value. So much power, flexibility and fault-tolerance, for so little money.

Avantages: 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.

Inconvénients: 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).

Commentaires: Once we got through the growing pains we don't have to field many helpdesk tickets from users getting use to this software coming from our previous spam filter. The other big benefit is that our previous spam filter service provider was about to double our yearly rate so your software ended up having a better spam detection rate and was also less expensive.

Avantages: 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.

Inconvénients: 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.