Missing expiration note email

Normally I get expiration note emails 20 days and then if I don't renew already 10 days before expiration.
However, this morning, I received the first expiration note 2 hours before expiration. I thoroughly searched all my email folders and definitely did not receive an email for this specific expiration date before.

My domain is:

zulan.net

I have two groups of domains on two hosts that I renew separately and get separete emails for. Both are equally affected.

I am fairly sure that my email-system was working to receive emails continuously and can pretty much rule out it eating 2x2 emails 10 days apart.

Was there a known issue with the Let's encrypt emailing? What else could have caused this? How can I avoid that in the future?

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Hi @Zulan, welcome to the LE community forum :slight_smile:

Yes; there was an email issue recently and it has been corrected is being dealt with.

I would try to automate the renewals before any expiry email is sent.
To that end, why aren't your certs being renewed automatically before the expiry emails are sent?
Perhaps that is something we can help you with here.

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Was it?

That issue was about sending expiration emails for already renewed certs. Although the issue about not sending expiry emails is known with the staff, I have not seen any issue on the Boulder github page nor have I seen anything mentioned about it being fixed.

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It seems you may be right - I may be crazy!
There were two ongoing email issues and only one has been explicitly corrected.
We may have to wait a bit to see if this other issue still remains.

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See here: https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/emails-gone-wild/160153/10?u=osiris

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@Osiris, You are too funny!
[that is a topic I opened]

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That's right, the incorrect data issue -- which prompted us to stop the mailer for most of the week -- is fixed. However, the mailer has had a different issue where it isn't always able to send the emails on time. That issue doesn't yet have a root cause, but I have some changes in flight (going to Staging on Monday) that might help it.

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Thank's for the info. I really appreciate that this is being addressed. Admittedly, I did rely on those emails. I will also try to work on the automated renewal and restart of all affected services.

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Let us know if you need any help along the way :slight_smile:

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Yeah, the expiration emails documentation seems to give the impression that it's something you can expect and rely on, whereas in my view the emails should be a last-ditch effort one would only see after several other things have gone wrong to let you know what your automated renewals and monitoring thereof didn't actually work.

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Good call. I've opened Make the expiration emails page indicate that it's a best-effort service by jcjones · Pull Request #1304 · letsencrypt/website · GitHub which I won't claim is the right wording, but at least is a starting point.

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