Correct. That's a reasonable thing to do. You sign up with a service you trust because it's convenient and useful to you (e.g., Etacts), and then you make sure that your trust isn't abused.

You do the same with your credit card whenever you purchased from a site or in a store. You trust them, but then verify that you are not being screwed over.

Actually the correct thing would be not to give your email password to 3rd party website especially if you know will panic afterwards for every strange IP you'll see in your logs.

The credit card comparison doesn't really make sense as credit cards were especially designed to be used the way we use them.

Email accounts haven't been designed to be used in such a fashion as to allow 3rd party applications access them. Especially not the kind of email services where you don't have access to the server / firewall. What Google is providing is a nice thing but you only get the see the last 10 entries or so. What happens when you go on vacation ? What happens if you use some other email provider ?

My point is that the main conclusion of your blog post should be about how you control this but how you should avoid doing this in the first place.