
Read more at wiki page devellopment at http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/PlainTextPasswords
See how pidgin store your passwords :
1- List all the content of .purple/
ls .purple/
Output
accels blist.xml icons prefs.xml status.xml
accounts.xml certificates logs smileys
2- Now open the file accounts.xml
cd .purple/
and type
gedit accounts.xml
See this how it looks like , the password in clear text

How to secure your pidgin accounts and passwords ?
Now actually if you want to secure your pidgin accounts and passwords, you need to use patch called Master password patch for Pidgin
Follow the installation steps in this post at ubuntu forums
But my advise is : Don`t autosave password in Pidgin for the moment, this mean that you have to type your password everytime you want to login to one of your accounts in pidgin, i see this as the safest way for the moment, because if you have to type the a password everytime you try to login , the password will not be stored in accounts.xml.
You can also see our article : Encrypt data in Linux/Unix
Links :






"they said that they will try to resolve this issue in futures releases" -- they don't say that anywhere, and on the contrary, they explain very nicely why the current way of storing passwords is the most proper one. Did you even read the linked wiki page at http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/PlainTextPasswords (or the screenshot you posted, which plainly says "this is unlikely to be changed")?