I have several free web browsers on my laptop,
but I generally do not look at web sites from
my own machine, aside from a few sites operated
for or by the GNU Project, FSF or me. I fetch
web pages from other sites by sending mail to a
program that fetches them, much like wget, and
then mails them back to me.
He's saying, much like wget (in as much as it is used to fetch a page and return the result as text) he sends an email asking for a web page which then responds with the page contents.
Now, as to why he does this, I have no idea. Thoughts anyone?
My guess is that he has added a price to following a link in order to reduce his information consumption because he realizes that without a cost there is the risk of gorging on things that he actually doesn't have the time for.
By artificially increasing the amount of effort required for reading a page (adding a resistance, such as a relatively complicated procedure for fetching the page) the hidden cost becomes much more visible.
IIRC, it is part information diet, part privacy filter - I would guess his web<->email gateway cannot disclose his location even by mistake (the way many VPN setups do - e.g. on my iPhone, if the VPN cOnnection times out while I am on a page with Ajax and lots of images, some requests go through the VPN and some directly. And an adversary can disrupt the VPN connection in various ways to cause that.)
Now, as to why he does this, I have no idea. Thoughts anyone?