How to Get Expiry Reminders by Email: Passport, Domain, SSL

Ways to get an expiry reminder by email

1. The issuer's own reminder: some send one, some don't. In Britain the DVLA sends a free MOT reminder by text or email a month before the test is due. For .com and the other generic endings, ICANN's rules say your registrar must notify you at least twice, about a month and a week before expiry. Insurers write before renewal, but that letter also brings the new price. Passport offices usually send nothing. Let's Encrypt stopped emailing about expiring certificates on June 4, 2025. Free and from the source. The catch: each one goes to the address you gave when you signed up.
2. A calendar entry with an alert: put the expiry date in the calendar you already look at, with an alert a month or two ahead. It costs nothing and works for anything with a date. The catch is that you have to enter every date yourself, in the right calendar. A reminder that pops up on a Tuesday morning gets swiped away. And the calendar doesn't know that you renewed early or moved the domain.
3. A document-expiry app or a spreadsheet: one list of everything that expires, with the dates and who holds it, and reminders in the weeks before. A family with four passports, or a small business with a few vehicles and a few licences, ends up wanting exactly this. The catch is another app to keep alive, and a list that's only right if someone updated it last time.
4. A monitor for domains and certificates: these read the expiry date themselves instead of asking you. UptimeRobot alerts you 30, 14 and 7 days before a certificate or domain expires, but only on its paid plans. Red Sift Certificates Lite watches up to 250 certificates for free, and is where Let's Encrypt now sends people. Uptime Kuma, if you run it on your own server, has both certificate and domain expiry notifications built in. Made for people who already keep a dashboard. No use for a passport.

An expiry reminder in one sentence

Write the dates the way you'd tell a friend: 'my passport expires on 14 March 2028, remind me nine months before and again at three', or 'the car insurance renews on 3 May, write to me a month before so I can shop around'. A real person sets it up. No account, no app, nothing for you to keep configured. One sentence can carry the whole list, and you add to it by replying.

For a domain or a certificate, just send the name. Both dates are public: the registry knows when the domain expires, and the certificate itself says when it does. We look them up ourselves and check again every week. When you renew, the reminder quietly resets. If a certificate renews itself, as most do, you never hear from us at all. A few country endings keep the domain's expiry date private. If yours is one, the first letter says so and you tell us the date.

Each letter says what expires, when, and what to do about it: a link to the renewal page, or the office to call. You choose how far ahead it comes. A second one arrives a week before the day, unless you tell us it's done. The first 7 days are free with no payment details; after that it is $5/month for that one list, and it stops by itself if you don't subscribe. Reply once to stop.

Good to know about expiry reminders

'Expires' often means earlier than the date on the document. Many countries won't let you in on a passport with less than six months left. Thailand asks for six months from the day you arrive, and the Schengen countries for three months after the day you leave. So for travel, a passport runs out half a year early, and the reminder belongs at nine months, not one. A domain wants renewing a month out. After it expires there's usually a window to get it back, but at a restore fee well above the renewal. Certificates are going the other way: the maximum lifetime is 398 days today and comes down in steps to 47 days by March 2029. So the honest answer there is automatic renewal, with a reminder for the day the automation quietly breaks.

Where the reminder lands matters more than who sends it. Registrars write to the address on file from registration. Often that's a developer who has left, or an address on the very domain that's about to lapse, and when the domain goes, that mailbox goes with it. Whatever you use, put the reminders on an address that will outlive the thing being reminded about.

Knowing is not renewing. A reminder buys you the weeks between the letter and the deadline. It doesn't fill in the form. Decide in advance who does. And a second reminder a week before the day is worth more than the first, because the first is the one people mean to get to.

Try it — hand us this sentence:

Common questions