Composing Mail in iOS 17 is Painful... Is It Just Me?

Hi all,

I'm not sure if I'm missing something here, but I'm having major issues with the native Mail app and others don't seem to be talking about these issues much from what I have seen. I'm using an iPhone 13 Pro running iOS 17.4.1, which at the time of writing is the latest public release of iOS 17.

1. When composing a new mail or a reply to an email, the misspelled words option in the rotor is unusable. Setting the rotor to that option and swiping up or down will often jump me to random points in the message (blank lines most of the time) but never actually picks up on any misspelled words like it does in the Messages app for example. This has actually been the case for a couple of years now and one that I have seen people mention every now and again, but it seems to be even worse now in iOS 17 in that the option sometimes doesn't appear at all.
2. Again when writing a mail, since the iOS 17.4.1 release, getting to the "Message Body" text field is hit and miss at best, and completely impossible when it really decides to misbehave. It's almost as though after the "subject" field, different parts of the message are seen as separate elements by VO, meaning I will land on a random point in the message rather than the "message body" field itself. Sometimes I can double tap wherever I have ended up and that will bring up the keyboard and allow me to read the full text as normal, other times this won't work at all. Again, this makes it difficult to review messages in full before I send them.
3. This one is not related to composing a message. Sometimes, when a message is forwarded to me, it will be seen by VO as one huge element rather than each paragraph of the message being separated as it would normally be when reading a message. Instead, everything from the message headers to the main content of the message, any links included etc are all read in one go after flicking to the message. When this happens, any links or attachments included in the message are almost completely inaccessible. I say almost because if I drag my finger around the screen I'm sometimes able to access certain parts of the message, but again it's fiddly and inconsistent. As for the rotor to navigate by links for example, forget it!

The last one is the hardest to reproduce as it doesn't happen all the time, and there's no particular type of message, formatting, a specific mail client etc that seems to cause it.

Because of these issues, in particular the first two, I'm at the point where I don't feel confident that I can compose emails on my iPhone and send them knowing that they look professional and that there are no typos or spelling errors anymore. I know there's the option of typing the message into Notes, performing any checks and corrections in there and then pasting into the Mail app, but I'm not sure if that causes the formatting to look different in any way?

Is anyone else experiencing these problems and found any other workarounds? I have verified that screen recognition is off.

I am of course going to report the above to Apple Accessibility as well, but would like to get a sense of how many people are impacted by these bugs. The only thing I haven't tried on my end is a full, factory reset of the phone, but this seems like a drastic option that, in my experience, is unlikely to resolve anything here.

Thanks for any thoughts/tips.