Another year in email marketing is almost gone and the good guys' battle against spam has barely made a dent. Black lists, content filters and challenge response are all a joke to spammers. Ninety-nine percent of spammers are never identified because of their uncanny ability to hide behind hijacked pc's and servers. As an email marketer, the only real silver bullet to combat spam is the unified use of SPF or Sender Policy Framework. SPF is a simple string of code attached to a domain that forces an email sender to be identified hence there is no place for spammers to hide. The biggest issue to using SPF in the battle against spam is getting network administrators to implement it on their DNS (Domain Name Service) in addition to them not allowing email to enter their network from a sender who has not implemented SPF. Two very simple things that need to be done in concert.
However there is a dirty little secret among domain registrars and DNS providers. This dirty secret is the simple fact that many of them do not support SPF.
2007 is going to be a lull for deliverability and email marketing in general is going to suffer. I think that network admins will be so fed up dealing with spam that there will be a quiet revolution to push DNS providers to support SPF. Once this happens these revolutionary network admins will be able to implement it causing a chain reaction down the network admin pyramid forcing broad-base implementation.