First off thank you for asking this question.
Yes, we would prefer that questions are asked in the Forum instead of emails for this primary reason:
So that we are not answering the same questions over and over in emails and instead the answer to questions are posted in a public place that someone can find and/or we can just send the relevant Forum link to folks in email responses.
We waited way too long to setup a Forum. By not setting up a Forum sooner BPS Pro Development has been set back an entire year. Answering 1,000 emails per day was a very foolish thing to do instead of creating a Forum and posting the questions and answers in a Forum.
The new policy on handling email questions vs Forum posts is this:
Email Response Time: Minimum 48 hour waiting period for a response
Forum Response Time: Up to 2 hours
What we do is put all the email questions that we receive into a holding mailbox for 48 hours. This allows us to not get distracted by incoming email questions all day long and instead just move them to the holding mailbox. After the 48 hour waiting period is up the email questions are handled in bulk and are posted in the Forum and answered in the Forum. By doing this we can designate one person to handle this monumental email handling task, delete any duplicate email questions and not have this email problem negatively impact us and BPS Pro users by setting BPS Pro Development/forward progress back.
So far new policy on handling email questions has greatly improved BPS Pro Development/forward progress.