Like many others have been reporting, the VM email service has been grindingly slow recently. Timeouts and server unreachable are the norm at the moment when loading a folder of messages, or trying to open a message. It's pretty well unusable.
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Oddly, just after I posted my message yesterday the email service came back to life. However as of this moment it is unavailable, presumably because an engineer is working on it somewhere, as per the service status.