Update: Had less time to post than I realized, hence the terse reply.

Meant to say those solutions are in addition to Lets Encrypt. An X509 certificate is an X509 certificate, regardless if its for https, imaps, or smtps. If you're distributing your stuff across multiple hosts or containers, then it makes sense to use some sort of automation, configuration management, or certificate management/distribution system.

The same thing everyone else does. Build automation, use configuration management, use cert manager or other similar solutions.

They never stopped supporting it, to my knowledge. I first started using their certs for my IMAP and SMTP servers 10ish years ago, at least.

If you use HTTP-01 challenge method you require an HTTP server on the host.

If you don't want an HTTP server on your imap/smtp server you need to use the DNS-01 challenge method.

This makes me wish I took photos of Diversi-Dial (aka D-Dial) setups, which somehow impressed me more due to how much they accomplished with much much less hardware.

They were able to set up a 7 x 300baud modems in real-time chat system on an Apple ][ . The original marketing called it a CB (Citizens Band) Simulator. They were able to run up to 1200baud, but I never saw one of those functioning.

As if 7 people chatting through a single 6502 wasn't impressive enough, many of them dedicated one or two of their lines to interlinking with other D-dials.

Talk about an esoteric memory.

- https://www.ddial.com/ - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversi-Dial

There are a lot of great comments here and I want to echo so many of them and not duplicate them.

There is one thing I'd like to add:

Learning to be happy while alone takes practice - lots of it. It's not easy, but it does get easier.

Learning to enjoy being along was one of the most important moments in my life, and it changed a lot of how I see the world now. I feel like this is up there with learning self-care that works for you - equally important and yet different.