A How to Guide on Configuring Drobo Dashboard Email Alerts for Google Apps and Gmail

A really convenient feature of Drobo is the ability to setup email alerts from Drobo Dashboard, a powerful companion utility application that shows you what Drobo is up to and adds important functionality including alert emails, data usage visualization and more.

If Drobo wants your attention or wants to alert you of something critical happening it can be configured to send you an email. Well, if you are like me and you use Google Apps (or Gmail) as your email solution, you might need to know how to configure Drobo Dashboard to do this.

Here’s a quick guide to get you up and running.

Getting Started

Get started by selecting “Email Settings” from the Drobo Dashboard menu. Then all you need to do is follow the steps below to get your setup configured for email.

Drobo Dashboard can send messages on all useful information, when a situation is important, or on critical situations only. Personally, I prefer the middle ground, which happens to be the default setting. You have the freedom of using any address you’d like, but I prefer have my alerts to my regular email address. The “sender” can be set to anything you’d like, but I think Google apps defaults it to your email address regardless of what you have set. At least that’s what I’m seeing happen.

All email messages will be sent from Google, but you can send to any email account. Use these steps regardless of who you are sending to.

Configuring Google Apps and Gmail

1. Enter the email address you want the alerts sent to as the “To” email address
2. Enter anything you’d like as the “From” email address
3. Enter “smtp.gmail.com” as the “Mail Server”
4. Enter “587″ as the “Port”
5. Check the “Authentication” box
6. Enter your valid Google Apps or Gmail address as the “Username”
7. Enter your valid Google Apps or Gmail password as the “Password”
8. Check the “Use SSL” box

If you want to test this out before selecting “OK”, click “Send Test E-mail” to make sure everything works as expected. If you get the test email alert, you’re golden! Click “OK” and you’re done.

Enjoy!