Yes, I m pretty sure you have missed something, Libby - those 396 people are almost certainly the closer matches, 20 cM's or higher, and if you click to "view all matches", you will find you have thousands more, even after the recent cull of small matches.
As for people with no tree, many of them will have done a DNA test just to see the "ethnicity estimate", and are not interested in doing family trees. I try to see them as a bonus, just extra matches we get from the ethnicity side of things, rather than a problem.
Also, I'm not sure the new messaging system is working completely properly yet, and even if it is, they may have set their settings so that they don't get an email to alert them to messages.
Sometimes you can figure out how they are related by looking at shared matches, or figure out who they are from their user name (e.g. if they have an unusual name you may be able to figure out their family tree from it, or if they have a "Segafan133" type username, Googling it might come up with info to tell you who they are.
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