It would be hard to overemphasize the advantages, cost savings, or numerous virtues of email. Email offers the best of the phone and the mail. It is as fast and as reliable as the phone, while compensating for the frailties of human memory by preserving a written record, as does the mail. Further, email allows for asynchronous communication, meaning that one can read one's email on one's own time, rather than having to play telephone tag. Web sites facilitate email correspondence when they make publicly available the email addresses of organization staff.
Sites can offer options which make sending a message as convenient as filling out a form.
They can also invoke an email mailer on many browsers when the visitor to a site clicks on the right button. If you are worried about getting too much email, more than you have time to answer, consider discarding any mail delivered by the US Postal Service and using the time you save to answer the few email messages you are lucky enough to receive. This is a large topic to cover in a short space. There are already several good books and online resources that provide guidance and documentation in this area. What follows are a few questions to ask yourself, definitions to know, and various tips to get started.