Tag Archives: certbot

Let’s Encrypt with Exim and Dovecot

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Following my post on setting up Let’s Encrypt with nginx, I experimented with installing the certificates from letsencrypt on my mail server. It was surprisingly straightforward. The key was that the verification of the domain, which requires port 80 or port 443 to be accessible on the host of the mail server. I run a secure mail server with Dovecot and Exim. Since on the server, nothing was hosted on port 80, I used the standalone plugin that runs a temporary standalone HTTP server for letsencrypt / certbot to access:

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HTTPS with Let’s Encrypt SSL and Nginx (using certbot)

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A few days ago I enabled HTTPS and SSL/TLS on this blog. A big barrier to enabling SSL on your website is the cost of the SSL certificate and the maintenance overhead of having to constantly renew your certificate. You could already get free SSL certificates with StartSSL, but the process of obtaining the certificate is still a manual process. A few months ago Mozilla and a bunch of companies came together and created Letsencrypt, a service which issues free SSL certificates that are automatically generated with a command line tool. When set up correctly, it alleviates the need for manual intervention. As of the writing of this blog post, the service is still in beta and support for Nginx is minimal, but it’s not difficult to set up.

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