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 or Body — equals, contains, begins, ends or matches — 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.

The wider guide to how Email2Phone works — get a phone call when your NAS emails you — covers filters, quiet hours and what happens when nobody picks up.

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 says a message is waiting. Press 1 to hear it, then 8 to save it, 7 to delete it or 5 to record a spoken reply; on a phone with voicemail switched off, nothing counts as delivered until someone does, and Email2Phone calls back, five times over three hours, if nobody does. A burst of alerts is one call, not one per email. Ringing several phones, quiet hours and dial-in replay are each covered in Help.

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
• See all integrations