It is the Most Important Steve Jobs Email Controversy of the Week: Did Jobs tell an angry customer to 'calm down' regarding his iPhone 4's reception problems? Apple PR says no. The blog that published the emails says he did.

The exchange started with the angry customer emailing Jobs about the well-documented iPhone antenna band problems. Jobs dismissed him with a "You are getting all worked up over a few days of rumors. Calm down." But after the Boy Genius Report published the emails, a "top Apple spokesman" said the entire thread was a fake. (As Baroness points out in the comments, the original uproar was over a misattributed quote to Jobs: "Retire, relax, enjoy your family. It is just a phone. Not worth it." Turns out it was actually the customer who wrote this. But the rest of the emails are legit, BGR says—Apple's spokesman said the entire thread was a hoax.)

Now, Boy Genius Report has posted a rebuttal, claiming that "the replies were all real, the timestamps were all matched up, and the thread was consistent. This was not faked in any way whatsoever." But BGR doesn't rule out the possibility that someone else wrote the emails—which means, technically, the Apple spokesperson would not have been lying when they denied that Steve Jobs "was the author of any of these statements."

"Steve Jobs" may be opening up Apple one email at a time, but unless we know what terse soul is actually behind the sjobs@apple.com account, these emails may just obscure more than they open. Could Steve Jobs, like Mark Zukerberg, have an email ghostwriter? We will email sjobs@apple.com tonight after a couple of Stinger cocktails and get to the bottom of this.

(Via Techcrunch)