folks-import tool to import meta-contacts data from Pidgin. So if Pidgin knows frank.reynolds@example.com and the_penguin@example.org are the same person, folks-import will catch Empathy up-to-speed.Now would be a good time to double-check your "Excuses for not switching to Empathy" list.
Thanks to Philip for writing the tool.
We've also got a nearly-working Pidgin backend to let Empathy support this functionality native in its Import wizard, but it was too late in the Gnome 2.32 release cycle to squeeze it in.
And farther into the future, Folks should perform reasonably aggressive auto-linking, which should make even semi-automated linking like this unnecessary.
--
If you've got AIM accounts, you may bump into bgo#629311. See the workaround.
Alternatively, if Empathy had some kind of integration with server-side logging, I'd switch, and work out how to migrate the logs to the server myself.