<metaname="description"content="A failure story Last week, I received an email from Let’s Encrypt reminding me to renew my certificates. I forgot to renew it and the certificate expired. Now I can’t send or receive any emails. If you send me email in the last week and wonder why I didn’t respond, this is the reason.">
<metaproperty="og:description"content="A failure story Last week, I received an email from Let’s Encrypt reminding me to renew my certificates. I forgot to renew it and the certificate expired. Now I can’t send or receive any emails. If you send me email in the last week and wonder why I didn’t respond, this is the reason.">
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<metaitemprop="description"content="A failure storyLast week, I received an email from Let’s Encrypt reminding me to renew my certificates. I forgot to renew it and the certificate expired. Now I can’t send or receive any emails. If you send me email in the last week and wonder why I didn’t respond, this is the reason.">
<p>Last week, I received an email from <ahref="https://letsencrypt.org/">Let’s Encrypt</a> reminding me to renew my certificates. I forgot to renew it and the certificate expired. Now I can’t send or receive any emails. If you send me email in the last week and wonder why I didn’t respond, this is the reason.</p>
<p>Anyway, I thought it will be easy to fix. Just run <codeclass="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">certbot</code> again and let him do the job, right? NOPE. It is not that easy. It is just giving me errors with some success messages. If I was not so clueless about what the heck I am doing, I could fix the error. But I don’t know anything about how SSL works and it is a shame.</p>
<p>I don’t even know the subject enough to Google it. I feel like I am the only guy in the planet whose certificate is expired. Seriously, how tf I can’t find a solution to a such common problem? There was a saying like, <em>“If you can’t find something on the internet, there is a high chance that you are being stupid”</em>. It was not exactly like this but I can’t find the original quote either. Argghh…</p>
<p>If you know the original quote, email me… No, do not email because it does not work. F%ck this thing. F*%k everything. I deserved this. Do not help. If I can’t fix this by myself, I should not call myself computer engineer. I am out.</p>
<p>The problem is fixed. One of my colleagues told me to reboot the server so that it will (<em>possibly</em>) trigger a script to get a new certificate. I did not think it would work because I already try to get a new certificate manually running <codeclass="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">certbot renew</code>. And yeah, it didn’t change anything but gave me courage to try other <em>dead simple</em> solutions.</p>
<p>One of them was adding missing MX records for my domain. <codeclass="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">certbot</code> was telling me that it can’t find any <codeclass="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">A</code> or <codeclass="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">AAAA</code> records for <codeclass="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">www.mail</code>. I didn’t think this is related with my problem because how would I receive emails before then? Anyway, I added the records and the errors are gone. It was only giving me success messages now. Everything seemed to be fine. But I still could not connect to my mail account.</p>
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<p>And here is the solution: <codeclass="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">sudo systemctl restart dovecot</code>. Kill me. I am <em>guessing</em> I had to restart the mail service because certificate has changed and it had to pick up the new one. I bet if I had run this command right after <codeclass="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">certbot renew</code> I would not face any issues. The error messages caused by missing mx records were not related with this problem but I was confused by them and I thought something wrong with my certificates.</p>
<p>Any way, I am happy that it is finally fixed. Did I learn something from this? Not much. But yeah, sometimes all you need is a simple restart :D</p>
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