I recently purchased two DS413j Synology NAS devices, running Disk Station Manager 4.1.
They offer various notification options, including Email, SMS and Push. These notifications are really helpful, as they can warn you of impending doom (for example, a failing disk).
It’s a fairly straight-forward process:
- Set up a dedicated Google Apps user account for sending your notifications (do not forget to activate the account via the webmail interface)
- Configure email notifications on your Synology NAS
- (Optional) customize the list of events that send out notifications
Configure Google Apps
Log on to Google Apps as a domain administrator and go to the Organization & users tab. Click “Create a new user” and follow the instructions to create a dedicated user account for sending your notifications (for example, “notifications@your.domain”). Activate that account (log on using the web interface, fill the Captcha, accept the conditions, set a secure password) and try sending an email from the web interface to verify that the account works.
Configure email notifications
On the Synology, open the web interface and go to Control Panel – Notification. On the General tab, check “Enable e-mail notifications” and enter the Google Apps email server details:
SMTP server: smtp.gmail.com
SMTP port: 587
Check “Secure connection (SSL/TLS) is required” (see Google Support for up-to-date SMTP server names and port numbers)
Next up, click “SMTP Authentication” and fill in the username and password for the Google Apps account you just created.
Finally, we need to specify who should receive these notifications. Enter your email address here and click “Send a test email”. You should receive a test notification within minutes.
If all is well, click Apply to save these settings. Done!
Optional: Customize notifications
I recommend leaving these settings at default (all events will send out an email). If you want to customize anyway, go to Control Panel – Notification and switch to the Advanced tab. Here you can select what type of events should trigger a notification.