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June 2, 2025 0

Monitoring Should Take Center Stage as Let’s Encrypt Abandons SSL Expiration Notifications

in Beyond Hashed Out, Industry Lowdown

Let’s Encrypt will stop sending SSL/TLS expiration emails effective June 4 — now’s the time to ensure you have SSL monitoring and alerts set up

Let’s Encrypt (LE) announced earlier this year that it would discontinue SSL/TLS expiration notification emails on Wednesday, June 4. That’s just two days from now, so now’s the time to be sure that you have the systems in place to help keep your certificate management on track once it’s “go time.”

Even if you’re using automation to keep your certificate renewed and updated (that’s good!), you’re not 100% home free. The unfortunate reality is that certificate renewal cron jobs/automated tasks can and do fail (online forums are rife with examples), leaving sites down due to an expired SSL/TLS certificate. Fortunately, there are some simple solutions.

So, what does all of this mean for Let’s Encrypt users, and what options are there for monitoring your SSL/TLS security?

Let’s hash it out.

TL;DR: A 15-Second Overview of What’s Happening

• Let’s Encrypt will eliminate certificate expiry notifications starting Wednesday (June 4, 2025).
• Let’s Encrypt users should be sure they have another system in place for monitoring and alerting them to expiring certificates.
• Automation + monitoring work together to avoid certificate-related outages and downtime.

What Let’s Encrypt’s Change Means for Your Organization

• If you use any Let’s Encrypt certificates: instead of relying on cron jobs alone to keep you out of the certificate expiration doghouse, set up certificate monitoring as an extra layer of protection to alert you before your certificates expire. In the email announcing this change, Let’s Encrypt suggested that users “Sign up for a third-party monitoring service that may provide expiration emails…”
• If you’re not using any Let’s Encrypt certificates: This change won’t affect you directly. However, you’ll still benefit from taking this opportunity to set up monitoring and alerting for your certificates (if you haven’t already).

Automation + Monitoring Is the Next Step in SSL Security

In truth, certificate lifecycle automation is where the industry has been headed for the better part of the last decade. This is due, at least in part, to the movement toward shorter certificate validity. And the reasons for that shift to automation are entirely understandable… at least, to a certain extent:

• By forcing shorter validity and automating certificate reissuance and renewals, it means each key is in use for less time. Ideally, this would reduce the risk of exposure stemming from a compromised key.
• Automation dramatically increases the ability of the internet as a whole to respond to threats and stay ahead of security vulnerabilities. This is especially important with quantum computing threats on the horizon and issues like harvest now, decrypt later attacks happening now.
• Automation can reduce the likelihood of downtime from expired certificates.

But just automating SSL certificate installation and renewal isn’t quite enough…

SSL monitoring — having a way to know in advance when your certificates will expire or if there’s another SSL/TLS issue with your site — is just as, if not more, important than shorter lifespans and automation. After all, installing SSL certificates on your site won’t help if they are:

• improperly installed or configured;
• expired because the renewal cron job silently failed;
• relying on outdated libraries, ciphers, or protocols; or
• causing other SSL-related issues for your site.

Gain Visibility of Certificate Expirations & Vulnerabilities with SSL Monitor

TheSSLstore.com is proud to offer SSL Monitor, an automated monitoring solution that helps you prevent certificate-related outages and issues. This tool monitors your domain(s) and subdomain(s) for certificate expirations and 110+ SSL/TLS vulnerabilities, including configuration errors and other issues that impact security and availability.

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