This is a feature request. In its simplest form, it should be possible to suppress notifications for a specific status (most commonly, "busy"). This is quite common in chat applications as it makes it simple to suppress notifications while still being able to receive messages, without requiring that the notification settings be reconfigured. A more advanced feature may allow the user to configure different sets of notification settings for each status/presence, however this may make configuring notifications very messy. A simple option to "Disable notifications when busy" and perhaps a separate one for "away" would be very useful. Reproducible: Always Reproducibility details are not applicable.
To confirm, when you are set as away in IM you want us to suppress all notifications, or just IM ones?
Just IM ones. Sorry, I should have specified. Since this is an IM status, it should only affect IM notifications, I believe.
I wanted to propose this as well. Even just splitting up the event "New incoming chat" into two events "New incoming chat when available" and "New incoming chat when not available" would allow the user to determine in which way he's notified when "available" or when away, busy, N/A, etc... Most of the time I like to have a popup showing me new incoming chats, but when actually busy, those little popups can be quite annoying.
Dear user, unfortunately Telepathy is no longer maintained. Please migrate to another solution, e.g. for Jabber a possibility is Kaidan, for Matrix a candidate is NeoChat.