History

[David Woolley]

Rachelle Power wrote:
> How can history be deleted for good?

I assume you mean that very small part of history stored in Pidgin's 
record of chats for which it was used, and stored on your PC.

You will need to mechanically destroy and then incinerate the machines 
hard disks and any backup media, USB keys, etc, onto which the data may 
have leaked.

If you can tolerate some possibility of recovery with specialist tools, 
there are programs available, free from Microsoft, for Windows, and from 
standard sources for Unix-like systems, that will make multiple 
overwrite passes, including random data.  You will need to erase, the 
actual history files, all unused space on the disk, and the swap space.

For protection against casual access, and assuming a default 
installation, on Windows, they are under %APPDATA%\.purple\logs and and 
for Unix-like systems, I believe they are under ~/.purple/logs, where % 
and ~ have the standard meaning for command line shells on those systems.

-- 
David Woolley
Emails are not formal business letters, whatever businesses may want.
RFC1855 says there should be an address here, but, in a world of spam,
that is no longer good advice, as archive address hiding may not work.