USER_IN_SPF_WHITELIST missing for some mails

[ram <ra...@netcore.co.in>]

I find the spamassassin's SPF checks extremely unreliable. A lot of
times I get SPF Fail of SPF Neutral for the same sender domain and IP
address. While it is supposed to pass 

The same mail shows SPF pass when I run SA on commandline

Is there something wrong with my configuration ? I use spamassassin
3.1.5 with MailScanner  


Thanks
Ram

Re: USER_IN_SPF_WHITELIST missing for some mails

[Matt Kettler <mk...@verizon.net>]

ram wrote:
> I find the spamassassin's SPF checks extremely unreliable. A lot of
> times I get SPF Fail of SPF Neutral for the same sender domain and IP
> address. While it is supposed to pass 
>
> The same mail shows SPF pass when I run SA on commandline
>
> Is there something wrong with my configuration ? I use spamassassin
> 3.1.5 with MailScanner  
>   
Note: unless you've got a distribution-patched version, SA 3.1.5 is
vulnerable to a DoS attack caused by over-long URLs in the message body.
You should check to make sure you're not vulnerable here.

http://spamassassin.apache.org/advisories/cve-2007-0451.txt


Personally, I've not encountered this problem with SPF and I use
MailScanner with SA 3.1.8. However, the part that sticks out to me most
isn't the difference caused by using the command-line tool. The
difference that sticks out to me is that these occur at different times,
which makes a big difference for network tests?

Any chance the DNS records for the sending domain are sometimes unavailable?

Or that the first DNS server in your /etc/resolv.conf isn't always
reliable? (Net::DNS which SA uses is well known to not use your
secondary DNS server in the event the primary fails, which is one reason
why it is recommended to have a simple caching DNS server on the same
box SA is running on.)