Quite the contrary. Since the Snowden revelations, all of his emails have the following header:
[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
Compare the number of government-level full-take Internet surveillance programs to the number of surveillance programs run by small "analytics" and "customer engagement" companies.
By this measure, browsing the web through an email proxy renders most surveillance methods blind to your activities.
It would still depend on where the email proxy is running, though.
Anyway, a regular free vpn (from his description, I'm sure he'd never exceed the limits) would achieve the same goals (and he could still use lynx et al and browse offline). Hell, browsing with javascript and cookies turned off shoud already defeat most surveillance, plus maybe change your IP every so often.
I agree with your comments in the second sentence of your second paragraph.
However, you're moving the goalposts. You said: "So [RMS] thinks emails can't be spied on [because he said 'One consequence of <my internet browsing> method is that most of the survellance methods used on the Internet can't see me.'". My comment illuminated the reasoning behind RMS's use of the word "most" and addressed your misunderstanding of the same.
That's fair. My reasoning was something like "this seems specifically designed to obscure IP, the only attackers likely to be able to do something about IP can also read email, therefore RMS doesn't know what he's talking about with regard to a threat model here". This was mostly implicit, which lead to my claim above that he thinks email is secure; it seemed like the only way to justify his claims for any threat model.
Quite the contrary. Since the Snowden revelations, all of his emails have the following header: