It just seems unlikely to me they'd go to the trouble of stripping STARTTLS for virus scanning for the very small percentage of IMAP users who use STARTTLS over 143 in preference to the usual 993.
The "filtering" Vodafone is doing might be causing speed issues if the downloads are from a site with user uploaded files, like Mediafire or a number of other similar hosting services. Compare the router's DNS responses with those from a trusted DNS server to find out.