1. A method of managing presence subscriptions for messaging services, comprising, at a computer system having one or more processors and memory: identifying a set of contacts with respect to an identified user; applying one or more subscription rules to the contacts; selecting a subset of the contacts based on the one or more subscription rules; and automatically establishing a presence subscription for each contact in the subset of contacts, wherein a presence subscription for a respective contact enables displaying to the identified user an indication of the online status of the respective contact.