What tips do you have for speaking to film festivals?

I'm trying to push my film out there to festivals. I don't know that well how to speak directly to the programmers of a festival. I feel like they are getting tons of emails every day. How do you convey to them that you are just a nice filmmaker who wants to share their movie with them for consideration? All festivals have submissions sites so what's the value of emailing a programmer directly if the right thing to do is go to a submission site and submit your film? (withoutabox, filmfreeway, etc). I feel these days too many people say that sending an email to hustle fixes everything when most of the time we all find email annoying.