Let’s Encrypt is ending expiration notice emails—for some very good reasons – Ars Technica

To save money and protect privacy, the successful service won’t bug you.
Let’s Encrypt has been providing free “wildcard” certificates for websites for nearly seven years, enabling HTTPS connections for millions of domains and doing the whole Internet a real solid.Now the nonprofit is ending a useful service, but in an exceedingly rare happenstance, it’s probably a good thing for everyone. Starting June 4, 2025, Let’s Encrypt will no longer notify its subscribers that their certification is about to expire and needs renewal. Some hosting providers automatically obtain and manage certificates from Let’s Encrypt, so there’s not much for them to do. Everyone else will have to do something, and likely it will still be free and automated.Let’s Encrypt is ending automated emails for four stated reasons, and all of them are pretty sensible. For one thing, lots of customers have been able to automate their certificate renewal. For another, providing the expiration notices costs “tens of thousands of dollars per year” and adds complexity to the nonprofit’s infrastructure as they are looking to add new and more useful services.If those were not enough, there is this particularly notable reason:Providing expiration notification emails means that we have to retain millions of email addresses connected to issuance records. As an organization that values privacy, removing this requirement is important to us.Let’s Encrypt recommends using Red Sift Certificates Lite to monitor certificate expirations, a service that is free for up to 250 certificates. The service also points to other options, including Datadog SSL monitoring and TrackSSL.It’s pretty hard to fault Let’s Encrypt for wanting to streamline and cut costs to focus on its mission, given its proven success at that mission so far. The Internet Security Research Group’s signing authority is well on its way to achieving its goal of a 100 percent web encryption rate, having gone from new offering to 1 billion certificates in just over four years. By providing a stable protocol (ACME), free of charge, Let’s Encrypt removed the painful paperwork, nominal charges that added up across domains, and web server configuration headaches of encrypting a site.As seen on its stats page, Let’s Encrypt peaked at offering just under 8 million encryption certificates per day in December 2024 and has seen the percentage of HTTPS webpages climb steadily from just under 30 percent in 2014 to more than 80 percent throughout 2024.Of course, if you’re an understimulated home sysadmin and feel the need to roll your own certificate authority, Ars’ Lee Hutchinson has a whole guide to doing just that.Ars Technica has been separating the signal from
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Source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/02/lets-encrypt-is-ending-expiration-notice-emails-for-some-very-good-reasons/