Why Did My User Get Locked Out of Mimecast, How to Unlock A User Account, and How to Change Mimecast Lockout Rules

Adjusting Mimecast lockout configuration

There are a few reasons a user can become locked out of their Mimecast account. The primary reason you will see is likely to be a forgotten password and too many attempts by the user causing the lockout. By default Mimecast has lockout threshold set to 5 attempts and the duration of the lockout will be 15 minutes. Many times you will have a user complain of being locked out and by the time you get to solving the problem they will be automatically unlocked. If you are not aware of the lockout duration this can be confusing for everyone. To view or change your current account lockout and duration you need to navigate to account>Password Complexity and Expiration.

Why did the Mimecast user get locked out?

This information can easily be obtained from the audit logs in Mimecast located in Account>Audit Logs. Once here you will want to search for the users email address, toggle the required time frame, and filter for Authentication Logs. Within these logs you will find the answer to why and how the user was locked out.

There is also other valuable information that can be obtained through these logs by looking at the User Account and Role Logs. These logs will be able to tell you about the reset requests, password changes, locks, and unlocks of the account.

 Unlocking the Mimecast account manually

The actual unlocking of the user account occurs in the directories>internal directories page where you can find the domain and user account. Once the user account is selected you will see an option to unlock the account.