Get a phone call when your Synology NAS reports a problem

Last updated September 2026

A degraded RAID volume is not urgent until the second drive fails, and the window between the two is exactly when the notification email sits unread. Drive and volume events are worth a call; almost nothing else on a NAS is.

Setting it up

1. Open notification settings in DSM. Control Panel → Notification → Email. Tick "Enable email notifications".
2. Set the recipient to your Email2Phone address. Use your own SMTP service or a Gmail/Microsoft 365 account as the sender, and put your Email2Phone address in the recipient field.
3. Choose which events send email. On the Rules tab, expand the categories and untick everything except the events that justify a call — Storage (drive failure, volume degraded or crashed), UPS (power failure, low battery) and System (fan failure, overheating).
4. Set a short subject prefix. DSM lets you set a subject prefix. Something like "NAS ALERT" makes the call easy to recognise and gives you a clean word to filter on.
5. Send a test message. Use the "Send a test email" button in DSM. Your phone rings and reads the test aloud.

Which alerts should ring the phone

Filter on your DSM subject prefix — for example "NAS ALERT" — so only the NAS events you selected in DSM can place a call.

Filters are the whole game here. A phone call is worth using precisely because it is rare — if everything calls you, nothing does. Most people end up with one or two filters and leave the rest of their notifications as email.

A filter is one condition and one action:

• If From, To, CC, Subject orBody — equals, contains, begins, ends ormatches — your text.
• Then either ignore the message, or tick the phones to call. One filter can ring several people.

Anything no filter excludes goes to your default number, so you can start with "everything calls me" and tighten from there.

QNAP QTS works the same way: Control Panel → System → Notification Center → Service Account and Device Pairing for the mail account, then a notification rule that sends email for storage and system events.

If the NAS is the thing that goes offline, its own notification cannot be sent. Pair this with an external uptime check for real coverage.

What happens when the call comes

• Your phone rings and a voice reads the alert aloud — press 1 for the header, 2 for the body.
• You have to acknowledge it. Press 8 to save, 7 to delete or 5 to record a spoken reply. Until somebody presses one of those, the alert counts as undelivered.
• Not acknowledged? Email2Phone leaves voicemail if you enabled that, or calls back at 5, 15, 30, 60 and once more at 60 minutes, and keeps the message in your online history.
• Ring several numbers at once or one after another, and choose whether the escalation stops as soon as somebody acknowledges or continues until everyone has been called.
• A burst of alerts is one call, not one per email — Email2Phone tells you how many messages are waiting, so a tool that fires 80 notifications in two minutes rings you once.
• Quiet hours are set per phone number, so an alert can reach a mobile overnight and a desk phone during the day. Planned maintenance? Suspend delivery from the account settings.
• Replay anything later by dialing in — access numbers in the US, Canada and UK, free on every plan.

What it costs, wherever you are

Email2Phone calls any phone in any country. Plans start at $10/month for 40 call credits, and a minute costs 1 credit to the US and Canada and 1–6 credits elsewhere — most alert calls are well under a minute either way. An admin routing only genuine outages to a call typically stays inside the Basic plan.Check the rate for your own number with the calculator.

Synology NAS questions

Other tools that work the same way

Email2Phone works with anything that can send an email, so the pattern above applies far beyond this one tool.

• Nagios
• Zabbix
• PRTG Network Monitor
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