Content-Type: text/plain Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: MIME-tools 5.427 (Entity 5.427) RT-Send-CC: X-RT-Original-Encoding: iso-8859-1 Content-Length: 256 Another reasonable behavior would be to see if the requested mechanism supports some kind of credential import. SPNEGO would implement this SPI; other mechansms probably wouldn't. That's a lot more work than failing out with GSS_S_BAD_MECH, of course.