For years, email marketing has been one of the few permission marketing channels. Of course, there will always be those direct marketers who choose to leverage the email channel without permission. These programs are doomed to suffer everything from disengagement to actual fines and legal persecution.

>Email marketing is constantly evolving, with social media, mobile and ISPs driving most of the change right now. Here are five predictions of how things will change in 2011:

What will the email world look like a year from now? Change used to happen incrementally, but look at the frenetic year that was 2010. Some things only change a little, like deliverability, rendering and spam issues. But the marketing world and email's role in it have begun to shift over the last 12 months, and the repercussions from those changes will be felt as trends for the next 12.