So far so good with these notifications!

It's a bit weird to have something flash that is not the place where the notifications are, but the blinking definitely helps to attract my attention to messages waiting (and to give me confidence if there aren't messages waiting, so I don't check compulsively).

Also, with that confidence, moving back to Empathy with integration with the messaging menu. The downside and the reason I'd stopped using it before is that I kept missing messages, but I think it's working now with the notifications extension.