A spammer’s lot may get tougher in 2010 if one pundit’s email predictions for this year bear fruit.

One prognostication by anti-spam expert Laura Atkins at her “Word to the Wise” blog is that DKIM–Domain Keys Identified Mail–will begin to supplant SPF–Sender Policy Framework–as a method for authenticating the senders of email.

Both methods were developed to counter “source address spoofing,” where spammers make their payloads look like they originated from a legitimate email source. SPF allows an email administrator to designate the Internet hosts that can claim emails originated at a certain domain. DKIM takes a tougher approach. It adds a cryptographic signature to outbound mail that can be verified at the message’s destination.

“I think we’re on the cusp of critical mass and signing will become less of a bonus and more of a given,” Atkins writes. “Right now, it seems that senders who are signing with DKIM are seeing a bit of a reputation bump just because they’re signing. I expect this positive effect will wane, but for now anyone who is signing seems to be seeing improved delivery.”

The use of domain-based reputation as a means of verifying email veracity will also be on the rise in the coming year, according to the spamfighter. Despite its rising popularity, though, it won’t totally replace IP-based reputation as a verification vehicle. “A few people have predicted that domain reputation will replace IP reputation, and they’re wrong,” Atkins declares. “Domain-based reputation will augment but not replace IP-based reputation.”

She added that a fertile clientele for domain-based reputation technology will be smaller email marketers who share IP addresses with others. “Small senders often have to share IP addresses with other senders and domain-based reputation will allow them to establish their own reputation separately from the reputation of other senders using the same IP,” she explains.

Another augury that could spank spammers is the increased use of engagement filtering by ISPs. Two mainstays of spamfighting used by ISPs have been complaints and email bounce rates. Online Web mail providers have long included a spam button in their interfaces to allow users to quickly complain when they receive a message that they believe to be spam. By the same token, if a message is sent to a suspicious number of invalid email addresses and is bounced, an email provider will leverage that information to block future messages with similar characteristics. However, measures like complaints and bounce rates can be “gamed”–manipulated by spammers to fool ISPs into thinking that junk mail is actually desired mail.

In recent times, ISPs have taken their filtering efforts to a new level through engagement. With engagement, what they try to do is read how their users feel about a piece of email by how they interact with it. If they ignore it, for instance, or fail to follow links in it, the message isn’t engaging that user’s attention so it’s likely that the user didn’t want it in the first place and won’t want messages similar to it in the future.

“‘Wanted’ mail will no longer be measured using the proxy measurements, as those have proven to be easy to game,” Atkins writes. “Instead, ISPs will directly measure how much recipients want a particular mail. These changes will force senders to stop sending mail that [generates] complaints and start sending mails that recipients are eager to receive.”

While social networks are all the rage on the Internet and marketers have been burning brain cells attempting to exploit the phenomenon, Atkins predicted that email will continue to be a pillar for online hucksters. “I don’t see social networking replacing email marketing at any time,” she notes. “I do see, though, email marketing giving recipients opportunities to share information with social networks.”

Savvy marketers, she asserts, will use email as a key to open up a target’s social networks to them. To do that, however, the marketer needs to offer the target something that’s wanted, wanted so much that he or she will want to tell the members of their social networks about it. If marketers followed that advice, it might not have any impact on spam, but it would significantly reduce the amount of marketing email flooding inboxes across the Internet.