Comment 62 for bug 206547

This has indeed regressed. The problem is that telepathy-indicator doesn't approve incoming messages until the corresponding menu item is activated. ("Approving" means that the channel request is forwared to Empathy.)

My first idea to fix this was to make telepathy-indicator an observer only, not an approver. Empathy's "Display incoming events in the notification area" preference must be turned off for this to work, so that Empathy approves channels automatically and opens the chat window. However, as soon as the window is created, Empathy tells telepathy to remove the pending message, which means that the messaging menu doesn't contain the new channel (and doesn't turn blue). It works for every message after the initial one, though.

My second idea was to make telepathy-indicator approve every incoming channel request, so that it gets handled immediately by Empathy. This has the same problem as above: the first message is immediately removed and the messaging menu doesn't turn blue.

[Aside: Both solutions suffer from the problem that Empathy sometimes opens new chats in the foreground, even though the event is explicitely marked as not originating from a user action.]

I assume the last option is to patch Empathy to only remove pending messages when the window is focussed. Maybe someone with more insight into telepathy has a better idea on how to fix this?