Synology recently announced the official release of the new Disk Station Manager (DSM) 2.1 firmware, introducing Mail Station capability, File Station 2, Surveillance Station 2, enhanced RAID management and additions to the AJAX web user interface.

Most importantly the Mail Station is a big leap forward for the already feature packed NAS box, enabling users to run their own Mail Server directly from the NAS unit. Supported protocols include webmail, SMTP, POP3 and IMAP mail. This means you can setup each user with their own dedicated mailbox, and can send and receive alerts directly to the mailbox. The Roundcube webmail client utilized is very capable, elegant and professional – a contender for any of the existing popular webmail clients.

Installation of the new 2.1 firmware, and Mail Station add-on was very quick and easy, the firmware upgrade took less than 10 minutes to complete and all my settings were transferred in the process. The Mail Station took slightly longer to setup, around 20 minutes to setup and test, but ultimately it was a straight forward process, which was clearly documented and explained. I did have a slight problem when attempting to upgrade the firmware via Mozilla Firefox, it froze while uploading the firmware, however this didn’t seem to be a problem with IE8.

Another major upgrade was added to the File Station, where by users are now able to upload multiple files via the web file manager, set folder/subfolder level permissions, add, edit, delete and extract files directly from the file manager. All in all a fully featured web file manager.

My only outstanding gripe with the otherwise brilliant Synology DSM firmware is the lack of ip/bad peer filters on the download managed, particularly on the Bit Torrent downloads. Without IP filters i point blank refuse to use the BT download functionality. Hopefully this will be included in future firmware, although so far Synology have not acknowledged it as something they are working towards, despite numerous cries for this on the Synology community forums.

More details on the official release can be found on the Synology website.