Mass (spam) emails seeking short term internship, solutions This question asking if the subject of current question is spam or not serves as the motivation for further, seeking solutions. As can be seen from the answers and comments, the emails from undergraduate students seeking a short term internship in en masse can be identified as a legitimate problem faced by many in Academia. Most of the emails have a common design or made out of same template and an equivocal tone. Even the researchers who doesn't even started a group were targeted asking them to consider the application to join the group(which doesn't exist) and claiming that the applicant had read the publication(doesn't exist either) on so and so topic. The epicenter of these mass outbreak is a particular country according to the OP and the answered. Some pointed out that most of it are indeed from legitimate students but overly opportunistic and some pointed out the reason why. If this is indeed a growing trend and a real issue,


How can the target weed out the emails considering that some applications are indeed real?
Taking into account that this may harm the chances of talented students and may form a negative general opinion(?), what measures can be taken to make the students aware that sending out emails in mass is not a professional way to attain a position?
What I do is to provide on my web page a very explicit set of directions for how to contact me about possibly doing any kind of work with my group. I have separate sections for undergrads, grads, and postdocs. For undergrads, I explain a bit about what we do in my group, describe what undergrad research in the group is like, ask them to answer a few questions about what draws them to our work in particular, what they hope to gain by working with us, about their skills and background, and about their general interest and experience reading primary literature. I also ask for a transcript. You could ask anything, though. 

With something like this in place, you can either ignore with good conscience any emails that fail to address these questions, or you can send a brief form-letter response asking that the applicant address these questions in order to be considered for a position.