Clearing saved conversations from Empathy IM

Empathy IM is the current default IM client in GNome.

Every time you sign in and open a chat window, it shows all your previous conversations in the same window above. Doing a Conversation > clear or a ctrl+L will only temporarily clear the screen. When you reopen the window, it reappears. It stores all the conversations as text files (xml with .log extensions).

If you do not want Empathy to log your conversations or rather if you just want to remove all the conversations that it has saved, in the current version(2.28.1.1), there is probably no way to clear the saved conversations permanently from the GUI(at least I could not find it yet).

The Empathy logs are stored in the following folder,

/your_home_folder/.local/share/Empathy/logs/

cd ~/.local/share/Empathy/logs/

you should be able to find a folder named after your IM account in there. And inside it, you should be able to see a folder for each of your contact containing logs of previous conversations.

Deleting my IM account folder from Empathy's log folder cleared the previous conversations permanently for me. However, fresh conversations are logged when you use the client again. Hopefully, future versions will have some mechanism to control this chat log.