The problem has arisen, because folks exposes only tpcontacts, which is reasonable. But empathy, folks and any potential other client need the tpaccount in order to do anything with the contact (folks needs it to set some attributes in tpfpersona, e.g. the protocol). empathy and folks both use the same approach: they get the connection from the contact, get all the accounts from the account manager and compare the connection of each account to the connection of the contact.

tp-glib should provide some api to do this in an easy way without getting all the accounts and comparing them yourself.