boulder
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letsencrypt
Better Expiry Email System
In the community there has been relatively steady demand for a better expiry email system. Here are two of the latest instances of confusion caused by the current system:
https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/unable-to-unsubscribe-from-email/148547
https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/expiry-date-in-email-does-not-match-the-browser/148584
My proposal is to have a brainstorming session in the community to come up with suggestions/direction for a better expiry email system.
This is on our internal radar, too, and we have preliminary plans to rework how we handle these e-mails. The work will be complicated by needing to integrate with our external Email Service Provider (ESP)'s systems, including compliance (i.e. it being highly critical to respect unsubscribe requests).
I'm glad to hear it's forthcoming. 😊
Figured I'd open up the discussion to mull over the details amongst the crew.
This is the main improvement I want to make, which I think should fix about 90% of these cases: https://github.com/letsencrypt/boulder/issues/4702
Secondarily, https://github.com/letsencrypt/boulder/issues/2475 and https://github.com/letsencrypt/boulder/issues/4695
While I believe the suggestion in #4702 will handle the straightforward cases, my primary concern is that there are many users who lose track of the spaghetti of certificate trails they create. If the concept is "a valid ( unexpired and unrevoked) certificate [exists == is installed] for this domain", there could be dire consequences through deliberate withholding of an expiry notice. In essence, since we have no direct way of knowing which certificate covering a domain name a user intends to be installed (short of querying what is actually installed for that domain name), I feel like it's tricky to make any assumption that errs on the side of false negatives in terms of expiry emails sent.
As an extension of this it would be great if you could follow a link in the expiry emails to then access your Let's Encrypt 'account' (as LE see it) via a web interface, to manage subscription prefs, see issued certs, possibly perform revokes etc. Some vendors provide a 'magic link' method for this so you don't have to set a password.
As a further extension of that you could then use that as a conduit for paid support tickets (i.e. paid support from LE to help solve an immediate cert renewal problem) - that may not be something LE wants to provide but it seems it would help fund the org/scalability.
Just wanted to reference #5218 (which the current issue supersedes) in order to include the discussion @jsha and I had there.
FYI, Mailchimp has an API endpoint to handle removing unsubs now.
That being said... I have intensely disliked their products, service and pricing for many years.
IMHO, for transactional API based emails, Sendgrid tends to be one of the best options... but Amazon's service is cheaper and easier. For marketing/publishing stuff, I was partial to Sailthru (and they used to be great on contract negotiation), but I haven't used them since they were acquired by Campaign Monitor.
