Paul, Conspire co-founder and CTO, here. Thanks a lot for the feedback.
I understand granting "manage my email" access is a big step. Unfortunately, Gmail/Google Apps IMAP access is currently all-or-nothing. All we need to understand the network is read-only access to message headers--not including subject line--but we're forced to ask for everything.
The new Gmail API, https://developers.google.com/gmail/api/, adds a read-only (but not a read-only-headers) permission. We're looking forward to making the switch, but right now the performance difference between the Gmail API and plain IMAP is prohibitive. More on that here: http://blog.conspire.com/post/100016691078/why-we-arent-usin....