Comment 19 for bug 462994

Account details are in ~/.mission-control/accounts/accounts.cfg, except passwords and other secrets which are in gnome-keyring (if you have it), and avatar images which are in subdirectories of ~/.mission-control/accounts.

I suspect that the problem is that the original reporter deleted the underlying files (only), but MC was still running (so the accounts were in memory). Next time something relevant to those accounts happened, it wrote out its configuration to the files, and they reappeared.

The only supported way to remove accounts from MC is to remove them via its D-Bus API, for which several UIs exist (including Empathy). I do not consider deleting files directly to be a supported action.[1]

The Empathy accounts UI is the recommended user-friendly way to make that happen (in the version I'm running, each account in the list has a trash-can icon on the right side, which deletes it). The "remove" subcommand in /usr/bin/mc-tool is a less user-friendly way to do the same thing.

With my Debian hat on, removing user data on purge would be a release-critical (grave) bug. Purging a package removes it at the system level, but does not and should not remove individual users' data.

[1] Coincidentally, it works if you go offline in Empathy, then kill the mission-control-5 process (or log out and back in), *then* delete the files, but this is not guaranteed for future versions.