Comment 12 for bug 552543

The more I think about the subject the more I agree that the current Empathy behavior is wrong.

I took a time to see what Pidgin does in this case, and it seems to queue the conversation windows in the status icon: the status only goes out of attention mode when you clicked it a number of times corresponding to the number of users who you received notifications about. Each click opens the conversation window of one of those users, prioritizing most recent.

It's like the messaging menu, except that you don't choose the order you want to open the conversation windows. But this is not a big deal because (1) prioritizing most recent is reasonable and (2) the messaging menu induces you to do that anyway, by ordering the indicators in the same way.

In short, I think the full fix requires changing Empathy to do the following:

a) Always show notifications, regardless of situation. Never inhibit them.

b) Queue conversation windows in the status icon, like Pidgin does.

Patching (a) is probably trivial, while (b) is probably complex. It would be interesting to see what upstream has to say about this.