While I understand the concerns about the volume of emails and, for some, their repetitiveness, I'm not sure multiplying the lists is going to help that much. The [EMAIL PROTECTED] is precisely there as the first point of entry for users, and should be where most of the general questions should be addressed, by other users, documentation people, developers and other listizens (all of these being what you refer to as support volunteers).
Does OO.o have a 'support' project? If not, it should have one. Its as important a part of a software product as is development, documentation, marketing, etc.
With a support project we could have SPVs (support project volunteers) who volunteer themselves to answer problems and, because they would sign themselves as SPVs would carry a certain amount of authority. They would of course be expected, as project members, to follow accepted standards of conduct.
I would also suggest a separate list ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) to handle the rookie users' problems, leaving users to discuss problems of a more technical nature. I think this might help with one big problem which seems to be 'I posted a question and got nnn replies, none of which answered my problem'. Anything that reduces the number of emails a new user that just needs advice on how to get started sees, will help enormously.
More specific requests can then be forwarded if need be to either the native language lists (users@<lang>.ooo) or the project-specific user lists (users@<project>.ooo). While you're right that users shouldn't feel assaulted with replies s/he feels don't help, I tend to believe that too many replies is not too bad, as it at least conveys to the user a sense that people are caring about the problem.
I think on the other hand the user should not have the feeling s/he's been redirected from one place to the other without much gain each time ("Welcome to the IRC channel, sorry there are mostly developers/builders here, please join and ask on [EMAIL PROTECTED]", "Welcome to [EMAIL PROTECTED], apparently you know where the zip you downloaded is, managed to unzip it and run setup, OOo has not taken over your desktop so sorry, we can't help you, please join and ask on [EMAIL PROTECTED]", "Welcome to [EMAIL PROTECTED], get ready for hundreds of email a day, and by the way, your problem with the Access feature missing in Base seems quite specific, please join and ask on [EMAIL PROTECTED]", and so on ;-)).
Anyway, just my thoughts,
Cyrille
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