Each trick in the Spammers' Compendium has a friendly name (which is intended to be humourous), and also a SPUTR name. SPUTR (Spam/Phish Uniform Trick Repository) is a naming scheme for spammer and phisher content tricks that was first proposed by John Graham-Cumming. More details can be found here.
Each name consists of three '!'-separated parts: a purpose, a name, and a technology.
The following table contains a list of 'purposes' that can be used to categorize tricks.
| BWO | Bad word obfuscation | Making it hard for a filter to parse potentially bad words (e.g. Viagra) |
| GW | Good word insertion | Adding words likely to confuse a statistical filter. |
| HB | Hash busting | Inserting randomness designed to make message hashing hard. |
| TA | Tokenization avoidance | Preventing a filter from tokenizing a message. |
| UH | URL hiding | Hiding a URL so that a user is fooled into clicking an incorrect link. |
| UO | URL obfuscation | Making it hard for a filter to identify a URL and check it against a black list. |
| WB | Web bugs | Inserting a beacon that tells the spammer that a message has been read. |
For a single name there could be multiple tricks using different technologies (e.g. some tricks might be implemented using HTML or CSS), or tricks that are intended for different purposes (words might be inserted to fool a Bayesian filter or to break a hash).
This table shows the 'technologies' that are recognized in the naming scheme:
| CSS | Use of CSS |
| HTML | Any HTML without using CSS |
| Javascript | Use of Javascript for trickery |
| MIME | Manipulation of MIME |
| Use of PDF files | |
| Plain | Plain text |
| Image | Images (GIF, JPG or PNG) |
| Flash | Macromedia Flash |
| Audio | Any audio file format |
| Office | Any office file format |