Comment 14 for bug 385175

I can confirm this bug/missing feature. Adding contacts that require authorization doesn't work. It looks like Empathy/Telepathy doesn't send the authorization request properly.
In my case the contact, after being added, was shown as offline (despite being online). Re-adding several times did not help. The solution was to use Pidgin's "re-request authorization".

I also wonder why things that effectively make Empathy useless get a "low" importance, but that won't bother me anymore. Back to using Pidgin...