Steve Jobs at the WWDC

Central to the issue of Steve Jobs and Apple’s snub at users reporting iPhone 4’s signal issues were the reports published by the gadget rumor site Boy Genius Report (BGR) who  posted  email exchange between Steve Jobs and a iPhone 4 user , in which Jobs told an angry iPhone 4 customer complaining  about the iPhone 4’s antenna problems to  “calm down.”.  Apple told Engadget and Fortune magazine that the email  messages were fake,however, BGR is standing by the  story, and has  offered the email headers as proof.

As a  defense to publishing the messages BGR said that prior to publication it had received from the customer the headers from the alleged Jobs messages and that BGR’s “tech guys” had examined them. “Their response was yes, that they were legitimate, and that the entire thread would be extremely hard to fake, if not impossible,” BGR said.

The email exchange was observed to be unusual by some Apple watchers, who were of  opinion that Steve Jobs is generally brief in his personal emails to customers, but it read a little bit differently in response to this particular customer, incensed by issues with the iPhone 4 antenna.

BGR did concede some ground when it said that it had made a mistake in the original post by attributing one of the more harsh  comments to Apple , when, it had actually been made by the customer and also admitted that it paid the customer a “nominal fee” for the e-mail thread, but stood by the decision to publish the story because it was from Jobs’ e-mail address.