It just seems like, if this catches on, external control of such a dump would threaten Apple's PR department pretty extensively. Perhaps the emails have been excusable heretofore because it's not all that common that they come up and get "tons of press", as you claim, or because they figured those isolated emails that do get attention are relatively harmless and not a big deal as independent, one-off stories.

For instance, I check HN a lot, and I used to check reddit a lot, and I've heard of perhaps only two of these emails. Most of them do not cast Jobs in an overtly positive light. It's a publicist's nightmare, basically, because they lose control of the image.

And Apple is all about image. I don't know, I just think that there will be a lot of internal pressure on Jobs to stop emailing people who may go and repost the conversation verbatim. He might not stop, we all know that Jobs has a general contempt for business-as-usual and does what he wants, but making a thing like this just seems to kind of be "looking a gift horse in the mouth", as it were, because most CEOs have the sense not to even try personal responses to customer complaints or feedback for the reasons mentioned in this post.