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Don't most social media sites ask for permission to upload your contacts from elsewhere? The answer (as Nancy Reagan taught us) is to Just Say No.

Yes there is (a lot!) of job-hunting spam on LinkedIn, but when you need a job the spam can help. Even if you don't, it's useful to have a public place with an email address for professional contacts to find you, in case you switch firms.

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Yes most sites do ask for permission to upload your contacts, but they do it without needing your password. No need to log in as the user anymore to do this.

https://developers.google.com/google-apps/contacts/v3/

Not everyone uses Gmail.

Are the similar token-based schemes for non-Gmail services? Seems like OpenID or the like could provide similar functionality to avoid having to provide your actual password to other services so they can look at your inbox.

GMail allows you to give OAuth access to your email in an admirably simple way that anybody could adopt:

https://developers.google.com/gmail/xoauth2_protocol

In practice, I don't know any other email provider who does this.

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