While distressing, this was likely done specifically to 'pwn' Troy and not necessarily due to the email list on his blog being especially valuable to spammers.

While distressing, this was likely done specifically to 'pwn' Troy and not necessarily due to the email list on his blog being especially valuable to spammers. If you were on that list, you're not suddenly going to get a huge influx of penis pill/spam emails (you might get highly targeted phishing attempts, but, if you're like most people your email can easily be found anyways). Bulk spam is largely a solved problem, that's why big mailing lists divorced from the sending domain of their owners are mostly worthless these days (gmail/outlook/etc won't put an email sent to 100k people from a domain with no rep in the inbox) and quickly decay due to list rot and bad metrics. I know tons of people will fight me on this based on what used to happen decades ago, but it's true. More targeted low volume Phishing on the other hand, that's the real problem today. Gmail/Outlook/etc. don't have very sophisticated ways to prevent that. Low volume or 1:1 emails get way less scrutiny than bulk emails (you can't conduct business with outside firms without some level of permissionless communication), so be on the lookout.