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Subscribing
If you provide an email address to Let’s Encrypt when you create your account, we’ll do our best to automatically send you expiry notices when your certificate is coming up for renewal. We try to send the first notice at 20 days before your certificate expires, and the second and final notice at 7 days before it expires. We recommend that you rely on your ACME client to automatically renew your certificates, and only use these expiry notices as a warning to check on your automation.
When You Get an Expiration Email
If your certificate is already renewed, we won’t send an expiry notice. We consider a certificate to be renewed if there is a newer certificate with the exact same set of names, regardless of which account created it. If you’ve issued a new certificate that adds or removes a name relative to your old certificate, you will get expiration email about your old certificate. If you check the certificate currently running on your website, and it shows the correct date, no further action is needed. To see a history of issued certificates for your domain, you could search for your domain on certificate transparency log monitors such as crt.sh.
Unsubscribing
The email body has a link to unsubscribe from future notices. If you hit that link, you won’t get any expiration notices for the next year. The list of “who’s unsubscribed” is independent for Staging notices and Production notices, so you can feel free to unsubscribe from Staging without affecting your Production status.
Note that your unsubscribe is only valid for one year, so you will have to renew it every year.
There’s not yet a way for us to efficiently re-subscribe you if you unsubscribe. Our email provider, Mandrill, has a manual mechanism that we still need to automate.
However, you can change the email address on your account, which effectively
re-subscribes you. Many common email services treat yourname+1@example.com the
same as yourname@example.com. So if you update your email address to
yourname+1@example.com, you can start getting expiry mail again. With Certbot,
use:
certbot update_account --email yourname+1@example.com