How to politely respond to generic emails requesting a PhD/job in my lab? Without wasting too much time As I transition to faculty, I have increasingly gotten requests from people who want to do PhD's with me or want postdocs in my lab. 

Often these emails are extremely generic and don't suggest they know anything about my research. The descriptions of themselves suggests they've mostly studied completely unrelated topics to my research field (even as broadly defined as the topic at even the department level). 

I probably get at least one of these emails per day now (during graduate student application season), so it would be too cumbersome to send out a personalised response email to each one. And I imagine the volume will only increase if/when I become more established.

Most faculty surely just ignore/delete these types of emails, but I feel bad that these students appear to have gotten terrible (or no) advice about how to contact a prospective advisor, and I want to be helpful. How should I reply?
What I currently do is save the following text on my computer, and simply paste it in an email response every time I receive this type of email.


  I'm sorry to say that this email is too generic for me to consider you as a future PhD student working with me. Unfortunately, it doesn't demonstrate that you know what topics I work on. I'd recommend in the future sending only a few emails. Focus on max 10 or so potential supervisors that really fit your specific research interest. Explain what specifically drew you to them as a supervisor. Explain what you want to work on with them. You should have read one of their papers or at minimum read a description of their research from their webpage. The type of email you wrote will get very few responses because we receive several such emails. I hope this doesn't come off too harsh. I hope you might take this advice and improve next time if you send more emails in the future - because I really do want you to succeed.
  
  Here is an example of what I sent to my prospective PhD advisor 10 years ago. I only emailed 6 professors, because I really wanted to spend a lot of time tailoring my email to their interests and convincing them I wanted to work on the things they worked on.
  
  
    "My name is ____________ and I am a senior majoring in Applied
    Mathematics at UC Davis. I am interested in working in your lab during
    graduate studies because of my broad interests in theoretical ecology.
    
    Your website especially stood out because you state that you encourage
    independent research and teamwork. Currently, I am collaborating with
    six other students modelling plant population dynamics in fragmented
    landscapes. We defined our own research question, and although it was the toughest  part of the project it was the most rewarding. 
    
    During this project, I first came across your early work on
    the population dynamics of plants with a dormant life stage - and
    further reading some of your newer papers in epidemiology, predator
    prey dynamics and evolution, I really like the diversity of the
    problems in your lab.
    
    Specifically, I am interested in doing research in spatial ecology and
    understanding how populations spread. This is because spread is not
    only a fundamental process in ecology but also because it is at the
    heart of controlling environmental pests and diseases. I think your
    work on integral projection models will be especially relevant to the
    spread models I want to study (integro-difference equations). I am in
    the beginning phase of drafting an NSF graduate research fellowship
    application on how to best choose the locations of pest control when a
    pest species spreads according to such equations, and think you’d be
    an ideal supervisor for the project.
    
    I was wondering if you will have any openings for new graduate
    students in your lab this coming year? Any comments or feedback would
    be greatly appreciated."
  
  
  Note the parts about teamwork and independent research are specifically on this professors website that talks about qualities he looks for in graduate students. I didn't put this sentence in any of my emails to other professors (in fact all the sentences except for the first one are very different for each prospective professor). For most professors, I wrote shorter emails that focussed on how their work related to mine. For example, sentences like the bolded one in this email.
  
  cheers,
  
  -Dr X


The goal is to provide them with useful advice that they might take and become more successful in the future. Often these students come from disadvantaged backgrounds or from developing countries and I think it is really important to try to help them and not just ignore their emails. Of course, as one becomes more well known, even this strategy might prove to be cumbersome.

Over this past graduate student application season, nearly all of the students I sent this email response to were gushing with gratitude for the advice.