The discussion addresses the removal of the LETSENCRYPT_ACCOUNT_EMAIL requirement in Discourse, as Let’s Encrypt discontinued renewal email notifications on June 4, 2025 link. pfaffman notes that the email was once required for certificate issuance but is now obsolete, and the current logic blocking SSL setup without an email is unnecessary. Ethsim2 confirms the issue during a rebuild, and pfaffman suggests a temporary workaround by adding any email address. pfaffman explains the historical context, clarifying that the email was initially required and that renewal is now automated via acme.sh. The issue has been resolved in discourse/discourse_docker#1028 Falco.
As of June 4, Let’s Encrypt stopped sending email notifications about failing renewals, which was the only reason to have that ENV variable set.
I just ran discourse-setup-ruby and didn’t get a email address for LETSENCRYPT_ACCOUNT_EMAIL and now Discourse won’t work because the clever logic refuses to request a certification if there’s no email address. It’s been almost a year since including an email address in that variable did anything.
So this if needs to be deleted:
i noticed this on rebuild yesterday, i had to run .\launcher rebuild app after a seemingly successful .\discourse-setup. Looking forward to the fix you’ve mentioned 
Well, the easiest thing to do in the short term is just include an email address–any email address–in LETSENCRYPT_ACCOUNT_EMAIL.
what made us support renewal emails, when renewal happens automatically via the acme.sh cron job ?
The renewal emails were for a service, that was once provided by let’s encrypt, to notify you if your certificate was about to expire (see link above). There was really no reason for that test for LETSENCRYPT_ACCOUNT_EMAIL to be included when it was added 6 months ago.
I think that originally (8 years ago or so) Let’s Encrypt required an email address, which is why the test for it ever existed. For a long time, if you didn’t supply an email address, they’d not give you a cert.
There were some issues having to do with the nginx config that were breaking the renewals, even though the cron job was running (at least, I think that’s what it was; I didn’t pay careful attention to those updates, or I’d have brought this up then)
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