e-mail is down again

I've been abroad and have neither seen the sun nor been on the internet nor been able to check e-mail for 4 days. My e-mail provider has now incorporated an unreliable 'type the following line of random letters' box into its webmail access page, and no matter if everything is dead right I invariably get their 'error' message which means I can't get at my mail; now I also discover Outlook Express can't connect to any of my mailboxes from home.

I know there's important stuff there I need to see but at the moment I have no way of getting at it. If you're waiting to hear from me this is why, and I shall be venting my frustration on the phone to them tomorrow morning but have no way of knowing when things will be fixed.