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.)
