Mark, the reason we had decided on a separate dialog is that where an
application requires an account to be useful, it's quite reasonable for
the application to offer only an account setup interface at launch, and
to exit if you decline. Claws Mail, Emesene, Eva, Sim-IM, Twinkle, and
XChat are examples of Ubuntu applications that do this, and the next
version of Empathy may too. In these applications, it is not possible to
get to any general configuration interface before you have set up an
account, so it is not possible to get to the point that would let you
remove the application from the messaging menu (and thereby hide the
messaging menu). If you are the only person who ever uses the computer,
you could apply the nuclear option by uninstalling the unwanted program,
but what if you're not? Mary-Beth shouldn't need to go spelunking though
the interface of whatever crazy new IM program her son has installed on
the computer this week, so that she can find the option to prevent that
application from appearing in *her* messaging menu.

An alternative way to solve this problem, perhaps, would be to have a
user-specific whitelist of which applications may appear in the menu.
That way, Evolution would appear in the menu at all only if you have set
up an account in Evolution. Empathy would appear in the menu at all only
if you have set up an account in Empathy. And so on. This would diminish
the reliability of Mary-Beth telling Mary-Sue over the phone how to get
to Evolution if Mary-Sue had never used Evolution before. But perhaps
more importantly, it would mean that Mary-Beth would no longer need to
become a whiz at navigating preferences dialogs.

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