Transports in Spark are initializing after main xmpp account has logged in. So any new online contact appearing is determined as "just logging in". So if you are logging into say MSN, and there are 20 online users, you will get a burst of popups saying they are going online. So, Spark should (if it is possible) know that this is your login process and dont popup anything during that. Maybe a gateway should send some packet to inform Spark to not show popups and after a successful login send another packet to cancel that restriction.