Show HN: Jmail – Google Suite for Epstein files

(jmail.world)

332 points | by lukeigel 6 hours ago ago

64 comments

  • muzani 3 hours ago ago

    I'm impressed. You guys cloned a whole suite of products in a short period of time that cost millions of dollars. Even the little bits of humor look costly.

    On the other hand, it's way more information than I expected. I can see why someone would hesitate to release them - there's a lot to sift through and it's likely even the government couldn't sift through all of them to make sure their friends weren't mentioned somewhere.

    • Alex3917 3 hours ago ago

      > You guys cloned a whole suite of products in a short period of time that cost millions of dollars.

      At the risk of stating the obvious, the functionality isn't actually cloned, only the UI. The actual code powering Gmail probably dates back to the late 80s or early 90s and has had several hundred thousands of hours of work put into it. This is just a webpage that looks kind of similar.

      I point this out only because I've seen people saying that software businesses don't have moats anymore because of this, which is taking away a completely false lesson.

      • 113 2 hours ago ago

        I don't know if I'm just misremembering but it feels like over the last three years or so the technical knowledge on HN has gone down the toilet.

      • jonathanstrange 2 hours ago ago

        Out of curiosity, would you explain what you mean by that? Google was founded in 1998 and writing a mail client isn't terribly complicated. Did they buy some code for Gmail from an older company? Is Gmail older than Google?

        • wordpad an hour ago ago

          A full featured mailed client is insanely complicated. If you think mail client is just smtp, you probably think word is just text with some styling and excel is just some cells and functions.

          • appreciatorBus an hour ago ago

            I’m sure, buried somewhere deep in Google systems, are vestiges of mail server code originally written in the 80s. But when people use the name Gmail, they are generally referring to the client facing web app, which does not have any such code.

            • surajrmal 11 minutes ago ago

              If it exists, it's probably not at all related to Gmail or only used for testing. I don't think Google reuses a lot of third party code in its first party server software.

        • randall 2 hours ago ago

          it is not. gmail is 100% from paul bucheit.

        • esseph an hour ago ago

          Gmail is not just a mail client.

          • ape4 14 minutes ago ago

            The spam checker alone is an ton of work. It needs to handle millions of mails for millions of users a day.

      • malloc2048 an hour ago ago

        In 10 days now, with Claude Code Web, I now have feature parity+++ with several (over)paid bussiness administration suites in a niche in my country. I am planning to make it free and not decided yet whether to open source it.

        I think we're going to see a lot of free software coming out, especially the more CRUD like software. Single developers can compete with software with a large codebase and legacy. Of course in case of bussiness administration you want knowledgeable support and be sure the data is safe. That's worth a lot. But I have another business model in mind where I can also offer state of the art support, maintenance and data security.

        My software is basically SaaS with a companion Flutter app. Security and privacy are my number one priority and by using the fabulous SKILLS.MD my privacy compliance skill helps a lot and my security skill seems to be on par with other tools I tried to verify it with and it continues to learn.

        Advantage of Claude Code,it will fix it immediately when P1/CRITICAL and for the rest I only have to type: yes please ;-)

        In one day, I created an Android app in Kotlin (never wrote a single line in Kotlin) that is completely tailored to my son,he's a toddler of almost 3.

        It has a start screen with games that relate to events in his life we experienced together like feeding the dog (throw bones to a dog that looks enough like ours so he understands), a whack-a-mole game where gnomes appear on red with white-dot mushrooms (he discovered them in a nearby forest) and of course things like firefighting, police,excavator. Because it's so easy I've now left him with 50 mini games (yes, feature creep like behavior). Some are educational (learning colors, counting but toddler difficulty) or fun to do, like magic paint that shows colored particles as a trail following his finger or adding color to random shapes.

        TTS tell him what to do, encourages him, saying his name, telling him he did well when he completes a game.He gets random videos of family members cheering when he reaches a set score.

        Cheering videos are also AI made. Did that with the photo to video feature of Grok. I had 15 mini-games on day one, now 50 mini-games after a week. But entire time spent with supervising Claude is about 4 hours.

        And, I should not forget to mention, all from the browser of my mobile phone and very often in bed with Claude working while I sleep (previously also providing new prompts at night, when Claude would reset its limits).

        But I enjoy it so much and possibly I can make it a bussiness (although I worry someone else can relatively easy get feature parity with me)that I decided to get the Max 20x plan, and prompting 4 projects with each 2 to 3 running 'conversations' , never hit the limit anymore.

        • MarcelOlsz an hour ago ago

          >I decided to get the Max 20x plan, and prompting 4 projects with each 2 to 3 running 'conversations' , never hit the limit anymore.

          Can you expand on this please? Really cool btw.

    • lukeigel 3 hours ago ago

      Thanks! And it's a lot of info, yeah. ~90% of new data in yesterday's drop was photographs, which they redacted for us.

      The House Oversight Committee's giant drop in November had tons of data we still didn't take advantage of even after doing the original Jmail, like flight logs.

      For the Yahoo release, which is still ongoing, the folks at Drop Site News (see https://www.jmail.world/about) are handling the manual redaction which has been very time consuming, even with tons of AI to help in the background.

      • dvrp 3 hours ago ago

        Would be nice to explain at some point how we did the structuring of the destructured data.

        For now we’re focusing on fixing the bugs because we’re already seeing an insane wave of traffic so most of us are focused on keeping the site alive.

      • defrost 3 hours ago ago

        One interesting thread to pull is "Stuff released and then Yanked back" ...

        Images removed from Epstein files less than a day after being posted - https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-12-21/images-removed-from-e...

        promises all the sleuthing excitement of chasing the significance of Donald in a Drawer.

        • wahnfrieden an hour ago ago

          Images were also planted to falsely suggest incriminating evidence.

    • johnys 3 hours ago ago

      Yeah, there’s a ton of information. https://epsteinsecrets.com/network is another tool to pursue the data dumps.

    • lisbbb 14 minutes ago ago

      I have a feeling you are wrong about that. The government had all that in its possession for many years. My own take is that Epstein ran a highly successful blackmail operation, probably for Mossad, but maybe CIA. Anyhow, for whoever, they got all the best, most juicy stuff and the good stuff isn't getting released--no way, no how. The FBI took tons of materials off of that island and it all disappeared.

      My own take: I don't think a lot of those "girls" were victims. Virginia Giuffre certainly wasn't a victim--she knew exactly what she was doing and could have walked away at any time! She liked getting close to wealthy, powerful men. She wanted to marry one. After that didn't work out, Virginia cashed in later when the time was ripe (e.g. the "Get Trump" era where they needed a lot of women to come forward and accuse famous people of sex crimes so that they could normalize the attack on the main target: Trump).

      It is unclear whether there were a lot of truly underage, actual trafficking victims. I saw only one mention of it in some of the news clippings from the original legal case against Epstein and I don't know if he was ever charged with that at all. Basically, Maxwell recruited 17, 18, 19 year old masseuse/stripper/model types, the kind that are now selling themselves on OnlyFans, Chaturbate, etc. Bear in mind, 17 is only illegal in the US. Nasty, but I guess that was the reason for the island? Probably there is no lower age bound on the high seas or on a sovereign island or whatever legal fiction was created there.

      I'm not saying I agree with any of it and I certainly don't advocate it. What I am saying is that women make bad choices for money or access and later regret it. Then they go crying rape or running to lawyers to sue the deepest pockets. It's pretty disgusting and in a more civilized society, it would be dealt with far differently. I see it as a sign of our civilizational collapse, quite frankly.

    • TechDebtDevin an hour ago ago

      It's because Riley is a fkn spook, wouldn't be surprised if they had access weeks in advanced. I also wouldn't trust Riley to be an honest actor what so ever.

  • InMice an hour ago ago

    You added icons and functionality to go to the beginning or end of search/inbox - Something that gmail just has never budged on having and always annoyed me! One of the first things I noticed. I must not be alone on this lol

  • ned_roberts 3 minutes ago ago

    Search for “LSJ”: Little Saint James, his island.

  • tonymet a minute ago ago

    Because of JDate it took a minute to realize JMail stood for Jeffrey

  • dvrp 5 hours ago ago

    I participated on this project, but I'm not the main contributor. In fact, I'm working on running an ML model to get some nice gaussian splat visualizations of some of the relevant images based on the recent release by Apple's model: SHARP. It allows doing inference of a PLY point-cloud based on a single JPG image.

    Hopefully I can merge some UI for it soon, but I'm away from my main computer right now.

    EDIT: I'm going to text my friend Luke to comment and answer any questions about the project.

    EDIT2: I am also happy to expand on the technical details of the project once I get a stable internet connection.

    • Retr0id 2 hours ago ago

      What benefit do you get from the splat-ification? Surely any relevant details are visible in the original jpegs?

    • lukeigel 5 hours ago ago

      Yes, thanks Diego! Really excited about this.

      I'm one of the co-creators of Jmail alongside Riley Walz. We launched a Gmail-like view of Epstein's inbox last month. It got millions of page views, tons of really amazing requests to collaborate on making more related data accessible, and even new Yahoo emails that no one else has allowed the public to see.

      Yesterday's DOJ drop resulted in this very spontaneous rag-tag team of friends coming to my place in SF and each making their own app in the "Jmail" Suite. Riley and I are pretty shocked by how versatile this parody style is for visualizing Epstein's 20 year digital footprint.

      It's been a ton of fun and we're working hard to polish each view here.

  • anjel 20 minutes ago ago

    Way better than the DOJ UI but a pity the photo captions got stripped away

  • sieep 2 hours ago ago

    Keep up the good work boys this is great stuff and is actually a pretty intuitive way to view the files, ive been sharing it for weeks now.

  • umrashrf 2 hours ago ago

    That's definitely more than 15 GB of free space given by Google! Great work!

  • tacker2000 an hour ago ago

    Incredible! Great work!

    One suggestion: please add previous/next navigation on the images, so that one doesnt have to open an image, close, open again.

  • novoreorx 2 hours ago ago

    .world domain is a perfectly fit for this project, love to see more power brokers' profile joining this Jmail world

  • amarant 3 hours ago ago

    How complete is the material? I've seen "experts" in Swedish news paper DN claim so much is censored it looks like a cover up. Has that been your impression too?

    • lukeigel 2 hours ago ago

      We have three datasets in Jmail now:

      1. DOJ (The White House's docs that they were required by law to drop yesterday plus many court documents, videos, and other docs from many news cycles this year)

      2. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT (the House Oversight Committee's releases. giant November drop that led to the original Jmail, then some photo drops this month)

      3. Yahoo emails (originally sourced by DDoSecrets, then provided to us, redacted and verified by Drop Site News)

      There is so much material in HOUSE_OVERSIGHT that never appears in DOJ, and vice versa. And then the Yahoo drop reveals even more new material. It feels like three odd slices of a giant dataset that keeps getting released.

      re: people's complaints about yesterday's release having way too many redactions, I have no idea how much they over-redacted. I hear that they will release even more quite soon though.

      • cobertos 37 minutes ago ago

        Why and how is the data from DDoSecrets redacted?

        Do you have a page about each dataset you're sourcing and the background on them like your provide here?

        The "EFTA00000468" saga has me distrusting the authenticity of most of these datasets.

      • mikeyouse 2 hours ago ago

        Ah I was going to ask about the Yahoo emails.. are those distinct from the cloned Gmail messages or are they in the same inbox on your site?

        Has anyone written a parser for the text messages? A messages-like UI to be able to read through all the texts would be super interesting too. The format DOJ released them in is impossible to follow.

    • medler 2 hours ago ago

      Yes, it has been redacted far in excess of what the law allows, and the material is a tiny fraction of what the administration was required by law to release by this date

    • jibal 2 hours ago ago

      You don't have to lean on "experts" (or experts) or people at HN find these things out: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-08-01/epstei...

  • rynn 3 hours ago ago

    Where did you get all the data? The justice.gov site didn’t have a mass download option that I could find.

  • ok123456 3 hours ago ago

    https://www.jmail.world/thread/HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_026632?email=...

    Nice using self-emails as a knowledge base.

  • dvrp 5 hours ago ago
  • aizk 3 hours ago ago

    Shoot I wish I would've have known there was a collab, would've loved to participate in this.

  • the_gipsy 3 hours ago ago

    The back button doesn't work

    • lukeigel 3 hours ago ago

      In which app? Photos, email, etc? Tested across each.

      • dvrp 3 hours ago ago

        Also which platform? Mobile? I’ve noticed some burger menus failing on mobile.

  • sweca 3 hours ago ago

    Jemini is such a nice touch

  • lifestyleguru an hour ago ago

    Everytime I watch these private jets and helicopters I wonder why flying economy class has to be so miserable in terms of horizontal, vertical, and leg space.

  • stocksinsmocks 2 hours ago ago

    Epstein had a subscription to Intelligence Squared. I feel like his whole character has come into focus for me.

    I would have put the “release” part in scare quotes as anything important has been redacted.

  • randall 2 hours ago ago

    this is amazing

  • fredrickd 5 hours ago ago

    the J suite of products grows larger

  • gnabgib 5 hours ago ago

    Discussion (144 points, 29 days ago, 11 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46004118

    • dang 4 hours ago ago

      Despite the upvotes, that one only spent 8 minutes on HN's frontpage, so I think we can treat this repost as a non-dupe.

    • dvrp 5 hours ago ago

      I saw, but the project has changed since then. There's now Google Photos, improvements to Drive, Jemini (LLM that can assist when understanding the files), and JFlights for flight tracking.

      I sent an email to the hn email with more details!

    • lukeigel 5 hours ago ago

      Last night we made a ton of new apps and we added "the Epstein" files which DOJ dropped yesterday.

      Also since that post we worked with Drop Site News + DDoSecrets to post new Yahoo emails that no one has let the public see yet.

  • TechDebtDevin an hour ago ago

    Riley Walz is a spook who 100% has ties with intelligence, maybe use a more objective platform to sort through these resources.

    • TechDebtDevin 9 minutes ago ago

      People down voting to white knight for a wannabe (probably is) spook is wild A guy who worships surveillance bros, and imo is glorifying and downplaying the life of JE (because he looks up to these people) through this humorous take, totally in inappropriate.

  • kevin_thibedeau 3 hours ago ago

    Wonder how much that Clinton in a blue dress painting will go for.

  • andrewinardeer 3 hours ago ago
    • dvrp 3 hours ago ago

      just link dupe, but not content dupe

      read rest of the thread with more context on why