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

By Callum Stoneman, 10 May, 2024

Forum
iOS and iPadOS

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.

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Comments

By Brooke on Tuesday, May 7, 2024 - 19:46

I mentioned this on FB at some point and nobody else seemed to be having the same issues. Yup, sending mail is no longer easy. I'm having all the issues you mentioned, especially the second one. That one seems to happen every single time.

By Dennis Long on Tuesday, May 7, 2024 - 19:46

Please report especially the misspelled words issues. Thanks.

By Brad on Tuesday, May 7, 2024 - 19:46

I don't write a lot of emails using it but it's my main email app, it works well enough, you do have to swipe up and tap on hide add and you can turn off the other mail button thing, i'm not exactly sure where it is but it's somewhere in the settings, I'd say it's a pretty good email client.

By Callum Stoneman on Tuesday, May 7, 2024 - 19:46

Hi Brad,

Thanks for the suggestion. I have given Outlook a go previously and I do like it, but the problem I had was that when I sent messages, it would put my full email address instead of my name. I’m using iCloud Mail and apparently there’s no way to change the name field when the account is set to sync with Microsoft. A lot of people on the Microsoft Community forums were having the same problem.

I appreciate that won’t matter to some people, but again it just felt a bit unprofessional to me.

By Curtis Chong on Tuesday, May 7, 2024 - 19:46

I, too, have experienced this problem. So, I just write the body of my email in the native Notes app, verify no spelling errors, then cut/paste the whole note into the body of the email. I also do the same thing for replying and/or forwarding.

By Callum Stoneman on Monday, October 21, 2024 - 19:46

I was really hoping iOS 18 would fix these issues. The good news is that it’s now possible to navigate to the message body reliably. Unfortunately though, the misspelt words option is still unusable. Is this the same for everyone else?

By Callum Stoneman on Monday, October 21, 2024 - 19:46

Does anyone know if the Mail app on the iPad also has the above mentioned issues, or is Mail better on iPadOS? I would assume they're the same, but would be interested to hear people's experiences.

By Brad on Monday, October 21, 2024 - 19:46

Could you try GMail?

I've not tried it but I'd assume it's accessible, if not that then thunderbird, if there's an IOS version.