Ending Support for Expiration Notification Emails
letsencrypt.org
Since its inception, Let’s Encrypt has been sending expiration notification emails to subscribers that have provided an email address to us. We will be ending this service on June 4, 2025. The decision to end this service is the result of the following factors: Over the past 10 years more and more of our subscribers have been able to put reliable automation into place for certificate renewal. Providing expiration notification emails means that we have to retain millions of email addresses connected to issuance records.

I think it’s a good idea, everyone should be automating this anyway.

  • argon@lemmy.todayEnglish
    0·
    5 months ago

    Providing expiration notifications costs Let’s Encrypt tens of thousands of dollars per year

    Not doubting them, but I don’t understand how that’s possible.

    Storing the email addresses and expiration dates takes an irrelevant amount of storage space, even if they had billions of cutomers.

    Sending the emails should also not cost thousands, even if a significant amount of customers regularly let their certificates expire (which hopefull isn’t the case).

    So where are the tens of thousands of yearly costs coming from?

    • schizo@forum.uncomfortable.businessEnglish
      1·
      5 months ago

      As with all things email, they probably really wanted to make sure that the mails were delivered and thus were using a commercial MTA to ensure that.

      I’d wager, even at 20 or 30 or 40k a year, that’s way less than it’d cost to host infra and have at least two if not three engineers available 24/7 to maintain critical infra.

      Looking at my mail, over the years I’ve gotten a couple hundred email from them around certificates and expirations (and other things), and if you assume there’s a couple million sites using these certs, I could easily see how you’d end up in a situation where this could scale in cost very very slowly, until it’s suddenly a major drain.