ispell-message ignoring text before quote

[Victor T.S.]

According to the manual, `M-x ispell-message' checks the spelling in a
draft mail message, excluding cited material. However, I have found that
it is also ignoring the text inserted before the first quote.

To put an example, given the following three lines:

  misspeled
  > Some quoted text...
  wrongd

The first word, "misspeled", is ignored by ispell-message, while this
does not happen if it is moved to the second line -- after the citation.
Is this the intended behavior, or there must be something terribly wrong
with my Emacs configuration files?

Thanks,
Victor