Well, with the options from the wiki that allow for full customization (only 4 preferences + 3 feature), if you prefer to customize the preset that is best four you (Listen for “Any contact”) and look at all emails, you may disable the the “Start chat?” prompts completely and only manually look through the emails, by disallowing prompts for short emails (max. size zero) and enabling the visible “new email counter”, i.e. option 1) from the wiki.
It’s a question of having a choice and using the best default (the one that is the least limiting and has the least bothering possible problems).
Note, that for example those that only want to listen to chat messages from accepted chat partners, and even some with short email prompting enabled, may not want the new email counter to distract them, and thus customize the default and disable it. I still think the visible, silent new email counter should be enabled by default, for new users to get to know the email functions, and because disabling it would be limited the features too much for those that want to see long emails (for which prompts should be filtered out by default, to avoid the noise for accounts with a lot of email traffic).