Do students cold mail schools ahead of application process?

I too have seen many many posts from students about very simple info that’s easily available on a college website. When they ask those kinds of questions, my first thought is that they want one of us to research it for them. Other types of questions are asking for opinions, first hand experience, testing assumptions, and generally looking for help in understanding something…those are far different questions and likely make up a majority of the 9000 and 58,000 posts you so kindly referred to. And that type of info is typically not found on individual university websites.

Me - I have far less posts (since that seems to be the metric being used in this tread) so I guess I have nothing to add. Sorry.