I kind of agree about the flashing notifications, but on the other hand, just yesterday I took the output of a grep, sorted it and removed dupes via Emacs, and then tried to copy-and-paste it into Mail.app. Turns out there's some bug or other issue with pasting into new messages, and it dumped the newlines. Now I'm off searching for this issue and reading Apple support threads from 2008. If I was using Emacs as my mail client, presumably I wouldn't have this issue at all.