You can't infer anything from this episode about the suitability or unsuitability of email for any particular purpose.
This caught my eye as well.
I'm not sure what his objection to accessing email in a normal-ish way might be. Any ideas?
My best guess is that it's something surveillance-related, but really not sure.
> I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly.
(he describes his arrangements in detail here: https://www.stallman.org/stallman-computing.html)