That support will be a long, long slog of answering the same set of questions asked largely by people who are both less than expert at using computers and perhaps not their at their most eloquent or polite when urgently trying to complete a task.

The best advice I've read for this is to treat support emails as bug submissions. Questions about your company mean you don't have sufficient documentation, help, user interface, etc etc, and work should be put into shoring up those areas.

Obviously this idea doesn't eliminate all support requests, but I imagine it would reduce the deluge over time.

We solve this issue (for the most part) at my company using email templates for common questions... It works quite well too!

This could actually be an interesting machine learning problem. Train a system to classify incoming customer emails, and automatically respond with the email template that matches the class of question, and watch your support team get more and more free time.

Hilary Mason has a presentation about this, "How to Replace Yourself with a Very Small Shell Script"[1]. Recommended.

[1]: http://www.hilarymason.com/blog/ignitenyc-how-to-replace-you...

I believe Fog Creek has done something like that to classify which box to drop the customer emails in.

Honestly one of the benefits of getting into computer programming was to never get involved in tons of repetitive work.

If one person has a problem a multitude of people are going to have that problem, so yes hundreds of people asking about X.