This is a smart move. The amount of infrastructure complexity for what's essentially a band-aid for poor automation practices wasn't worth it.
We migrated ~800 domains to LE back in 2019 and initially relied heavily on those expiration emails as a safety net. But honestly, they became more of a crutch than a help. Once we implemented proper monitoring with Prometheus + cert-manager, we haven't had a single cert expire unexpectedly.
The privacy angle is interesting too. I hadn't considered how much PII they were sitting on just for this feature. With GDPR and similar regulations, that's a significant liability for what amounts to "your cron job didn't run" notifications.
For anyone panicking about this: if you're still depending on email notifications for cert renewal in 2025, this is your wake-up call to implement actual monitoring. Even a simple bash script that checks cert expiry dates and posts to a Slack webhook would be more reliable than email notifications.
Curious what their infrastructure costs actually were for this. "Tens of thousands per year" seems low for managing millions of emails, but I guess if it's just queuing jobs to an email service provider, that tracks.