[PureStorm]

Yo,

what you experience are the dating dynamics. As a woman, you get spammed with messages, while as a man you can be happy if you get one response mail every now and then.
Since women's inbox get clustered rather quickly, they often just skim through the messages and delete most without responding, especially those women who are only registered there to get validation and attention. This leads to many men not bothering to write much of a creative first mail since it's likely to just be thrown in the trash anyway if they don't look good enough.
But there are also men who might send you rude mails, being very sexual from the beginning and so on...don't let that put you down. Enough idiots on both sides...

OK, that's not directly my experience. I'm not into online dating. I have numerous friends who are, and also spent some hours being right next to some of them while they were trying to find a date (they asked for advice).

So the point is, if you receive too many messages to handle, you need to get those priorities straight. It's really great if you want to at least tell them if you're not interested instead of ignoring them, but yeah all that can eat up your time. You have the choice to either do it like most women and just delete all messages that aren't extremely interesting to you (but you're gonna miss out on chances if you do), or maybe some of the following:

1) End communication by telling them you're not interested if you are not. Don't reply to possible follow up mails
2) Whether you want to "become friends" with them depends on if you see them as friend material, and if you got the impression that they're also looking for friendship. Maybe tell them you see no chance of it becoming something serious, but you'd like to be friends. Some will quit, others might stay.
It's basically priorities...you've gotta know how much time you want to spend. But how you set those priorities, I can't really tell you that.