Sounds like you were only thinking for yourself, and that feature is still not what you truly wanted.
When thinking about it, one sees it is neither possible any more to just browse all classic emails without always having to tap through an unknown number of annoying silent prompts, nor possible to get truly notified about all classic emails. (Nor seeing the number of waiting new emails somewhere.)
One could very probably say there is hardly ever something that would count as a “contact request” to be found when actually browsing “classic emails” → And what happend? Better name for "Contact requests" · Issue #5 · deltachat/interface · GitHub
So what gets listed are more likely “classic emails”, plus messages that deltachat did not catch properly.
Beyond fixing the chat/email-message matching, the two possible and basic dimensions that need to be configurable independently in some way to cover the use-cases simply seem
- Selecting a [reachability/listen-to/contacted-by] setting (More useful "reachable by" chat interaction setting) and
- Selecting a presentation level (email-notifications/email-counter/separate email-list).
(A simple “show counter” option will do, as we once discussed, because “1) everybody” implies notifications and obsoletes the list.)
With this, silent “open chat?” prompts can be avoided almost completely, they are only needed to determine unsure chat/email-matching cases.
The wiki page already references all this, and questions could have been asked and discussed as well.