An e-mail exchange being attributed to Steve Jobs is a fake, and was not written by him, according to Apple (AAPL) public relations.

    The conversation was published Thursday by The Boy Genius Report and linked to by more than three dozen other sites. In it, a writer pretending to be Apple's CEO tries several times to mollify a customer called "Tom" (not his real name) who is furious about the iPhone 4's widely reported signal attenuation problem. In separate e-mail messages Jobs purportedly tells "Tom," who grows angrier with each exchange...

    • "No, you are getting all worked up over a few days of rumors. Calm down."

    • "You are most likely in an area with very low signal strength."

    • "You may be working from bad data. Not your fault. Stay tuned. We are working on it."

    • "Retire, relax, enjoy your family. It is just a phone. Not worth it." (In the latest version of the BGR report, this last line is attributed to "Tom.")

    Asked on the record whether Steve Jobs was the author of any of these statements, a top Apple spokesman emphatically denied it.

    Separately, AppleInsider is reporting that a similar exchange was shopped to them two days earlier by a Virginia man who offered to sell it to them for an unspecified amount of money.