Exactly! My point wasn't to get a ridiculous number of votes on it. My point in writing this was to be useful - even for me - as a "go-to" answer for the question that gets asked all the time (I did start out short-ish, and expanded it over time).
It's an outlier for sure; I think 99.9% of all posts never get beyond 50 votes, and most don't get over 10 - mind you, most of my posts have fewer than 2 votes. With popular topics, you get more votes simply because there are more people looking at your question; does that make this one so great because it has 700+ votes? I'd say it says that sending e-mails is a popular topic, first and foremost - and apparently the question is also somewhat useful. And then the snowball effect kicks in, and the post gets more popular because it's so popular.
Anyway, a +5 in a niche (such as this answer which someone gave to me on a rather narrow problem: http://stackoverflow.com/a/413836/19746 ), to me, carries more weight than +500 in a topic with which everyone is somewhat familiar.
It's an outlier for sure; I think 99.9% of all posts never get beyond 50 votes, and most don't get over 10 - mind you, most of my posts have fewer than 2 votes. With popular topics, you get more votes simply because there are more people looking at your question; does that make this one so great because it has 700+ votes? I'd say it says that sending e-mails is a popular topic, first and foremost - and apparently the question is also somewhat useful. And then the snowball effect kicks in, and the post gets more popular because it's so popular.
Anyway, a +5 in a niche (such as this answer which someone gave to me on a rather narrow problem: http://stackoverflow.com/a/413836/19746 ), to me, carries more weight than +500 in a topic with which everyone is somewhat familiar.