[Ayatana] Messaging menu: efficiently dismissing messages

[Conscious User <conscioususer@xxxxxxx>]

Hello all,

There was something I was wondering today and would like
to know your opinions on the matter. Currently, there
seems to be no implementation or even specification for
dismissing messages through the messaging menu. By
dismissing I mean:

- Chat: someone has sent you a message but you don't
want to respond because you are too busy or you simply
are angry with the person. :)

- Mail: you've received a new email but, because of
the mailbox it was sent to, you just know it's not
important enough for you to read right now.

- Microblogging: you've received a post that, despite
being a direct message, reply or mention, does not
require replying and you were able to read the entire
thing before the notification bubble faded out (this
one happens a lot to me, it's just 140 chars, after all)

Those cases cannot simply be ignored because the messaging
menu icon will stay in "draw attention" mode, preventing
me to notice messages sent afterwards. So to "unlit" the
icon in those cases I am forced to open the message even
though I won't reply. This feels suboptimal.

So I was wondering if it wouldn't be interesting for the
messaging menu to have a "clear" button of some sort,
which would remove all indicators at once.

Thoughts?