1557 pointsby lukeigel 277 days ago363 comments

Hi everyone! My name's Luke and I made the original Jmail here alongside Riley Walz. We had a ton of friends collaborate on building out more of the app suite last night in lieue of DOJ's "Epstein files" release. Please AMA!

Discussion

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dvrp · 277 days ago
See also: - JPhotos: https://www.jmail.world/photos - JDrive: https://www.jmail.world/drive - JAmazon: https://www.jmail.world/jamazon
- jtfrench · 277 days ago
  No way. Next level.
dvrp · 277 days 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.
- lukeigel · 277 days 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.
- Retr0id · 277 days ago
  What benefit do you get from the splat-ification? Surely any relevant details are visible in the original jpegs?
fredrickd · 277 days ago
the J suite of products grows larger
gnabgib · 277 days ago
Discussion (144 points, 29 days ago, 11 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46004118
- dvrp · 277 days 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 · 277 days 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.
- dang · 277 days 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.
  - ffin · 277 days ago
    Is data about how long links are on the front page available publicly anywhere?
    - dang · 277 days ago
      There are a number of third party sites that do this, such as hnrankings.info: https://hnrankings.info/46339600/ https://hnrankings.info/46004118/
aizk · 277 days ago
Shoot I wish I would've have known there was a collab, would've loved to participate in this.
the_gipsy · 277 days ago
The back button doesn't work
- lukeigel · 277 days ago
  In which app? Photos, email, etc? Tested across each.
  - dvrp · 277 days ago
    Also which platform? Mobile? I’ve noticed some burger menus failing on mobile.
muzani · 277 days 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.
- lukeigel · 277 days 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 · 277 days 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.
    - nsomaru · 276 days ago
      Hey, I’d be interested in your thoughts on this, or the key ideas/research results you relied on:
      - lukeigel · 276 days ago
        Yes! We used our friends at Reducto ( https://reducto.ai/ ) for all document extraction and parsing (one of the best companies I've ever referred to YC ;) ) We did an initial parsing pass of all four DOJ document batches on Friday. This takes a raw PDF and returns chunks containing typed blocks—each with a type (Title, Text, Figure, etc.), bounding boxes, content, and confidence scores. For PDFs that were just scans of photographs (which was like 90% of new content in Friday's release), it gave in depth descriptions of those! You can type search terms like "door" at https://www.jmail.world/photos to see what I mean. For apps like Jmail and JFlights we use their structured extraction endpoint instead—you define a schema (e.g. {from, to, subject, date, body} for emails or {departure_airport, arrival_airport, passengers[], date} for flights) and it pulls those fields directly into JSON. The JFlights example served as the best ad for Reducto and how doc parsing technology can speed up hours of journalistic investigations like this. See for yourself. Given this document https://www.jmail.world/drive/HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_002031 It inferred and enriched multiple flight cards on JFlights ( https://www.jmail.world/flights ). I was really shook when I first saw this.
        adit_a · 276 days ago
        This might be our coolest case study yet. Thanks for the mention!
  - defrost · 277 days 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 · 277 days ago
      Images were also planted to falsely suggest incriminating evidence.
      - wahnfrieden · 277 days ago
        I see people are not clued into this and incredulously downvote because the file release appears to be in good faith to them such that illegal evidence tampering is out of the question See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46341688
        zahlman · 277 days ago
        The post you link to is deleted.
      - bryanrasmussen · 277 days ago
        while true, it would probably be useful to provide examples. The one that I am aware of seems to be a picture showing Clinton, Michael Jackson, and Diana Ross with "redacted" victims https://www.imdb.com/news/ni65628031/ https://bsky.app/profile/meidastouch.com/post/3mag7myutmc2d however it seems that this photo is actually taken from a 2003 Democratic fundraiser, and the redacted images of victims were of Diana Ross' son Evan, and Michael Jackson's kids, Paris and Prince Jackson. This may or may not be accurate either, since I have not been able to dig down into the photo and determine if it has any connections to a supposed 2003 fundraiser. But it seems more likely to be true than not that this was sloppily planted evidence that was especially insultingly fake. on edit: looking closer does not seem to be exact same photos, but instead two different photos taken at the same time and place, so in the 2003 Dem fundraising, but a different photo of that. So it could be that Epstein had it and DOJ thought hey, look at these pervs! Let's release!!
        Arn_Thor · 277 days ago
        As you say, it's not the same photo. If the one in the dump was in Epstein's possession, the reason for the redactions are either that some drone in the DOJ just redacted all children out of habit, or that it was deliberately done in such a way as to frame Clinton. I can't decide which I find more credible.
        bryanrasmussen · 277 days ago
        I think if it hadn't been those adults with the kids an alert staffer might have thought "whose kids are these, these aren't young teenage girls, I better double check" But Michael Jackson, kids, Clinton arms around him, Diana Ross with young male, they're thinking they walked into an armory filled with nothing but smoking guns!
        dontlaugh · 276 days ago
        There’s no need to frame Clinton, there is plenty of evidence he was friends with and spent a lot of time with Epstein. Similarly situation with Trump, for that matter.
        brookst · 276 days ago
        It is perfectly possible, even common, to frame the guilty. It’s easier than finding real evidence.
        dontlaugh · 276 days ago
        Sure, but in this case there already is plenty of real evidence.
        mlrtime · 275 days ago
        There is actually no evidence that isn't circumstantial. Or correct me if I'm wrong? All the evidence I've seen is person A knew or spoke to Epstein. Where is the evidence linking any person to a specific sexual encounter?
        gruez · 276 days ago
        >the reason for the redactions are either that some drone in the DOJ just redacted all children out of habit, or that it was deliberately done in such a way as to frame Clinton They were supposed to redact all minors, not just "victims".
        wahnfrieden · 275 days ago
        Everyone is distracted by the redaction policy discussion. The concern is that it is from a charity event that is seemingly unrelated to Epstein.
        pohl · 276 days ago
        Is it possible that one is an input photo and the other is generative AI output?
  - alex1138 · 277 days ago
    I'm being snarky and this isn't such a serious comment and I don't really mean this for Gemini but can you imagine using something like Gemini ("Hi, please comb through this") and it just refuses on ethical grounds
    - lukeigel · 277 days ago
      We found that Codex indeed refuses but Claude + Gemini are willing to RAG it
      - muzani · 276 days ago
        Usually Claude is the prude. Personally I haven't even tried for fear what I'd find. I can stomach homicide and war pictures, but Epstein is too much.
        alex1138 · 276 days ago
        I just have real institutional problems with Google, they have all the best tech minds but some things are just off limits to them being politically correct And no, not Epstein. It's a general statement; but it's disappointing that they're like this (and of course Gemini was famously the one that gave black Nazis and things like that)
        underlipton · 276 days ago
        Google has never fixed their black people/gorilla issue. The foundational tech that all of their products run on going back a decade is fundamentally flawed (and outputs outputs that many would say align with racist ideologies, among others).
      - lukeigel · 276 days ago
        also, shoutout the Jason Liu ( https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jxnlco ) for discovering that one. His turbopuffer-based version of Jemini is coming soon!
  - genghisjahn · 276 days ago
    But, whoever’s doing the redacting sees the original right? What prevents the redactor from saying, “here’s what the document really said.” Or “here’s who’s in the image, I saw it before I redacted it?”
    - freedomben · 276 days ago
      The idea of spending the rest of their life in prison is what stops them
      - helterskelter · 276 days ago
        Yeah but a few words from somebody like Ghislaine could completely fuck shit up for a lot of people. Of course, she'll have hanged herself shortly afterward while the security cameras were malfunctioning.
    - mcintyre1994 · 276 days ago
      I’d guess a first pass is done automatically? Eg if a page mentions eg Trump, just redact that whole page/paragraph/etc. So the people who have done the closer reading to redact further probably don’t actually know the scale of what was already redacted. Just a guess though.
    - chiefalchemist · 276 days ago
      That’s a good point. I would imagine they break it up into pieces - in a reCAPTCHA sorta way - and any given person sees a sentence or a piece of a sentence. An alternative would be to strip out all obvious known words and only leave unknowns (i.e., names) and then have those fragments reviewed (in a reCAPTCHA sorta way). Finally, for images, cover all faces and the one by one decide which should remain covered and which should not. LOTS of work but there are workflows to mitigate the ability for reviewers to connect more than they should.
    - sigwinch · 276 days ago
      Part of the law mandates that all redactions will be listed for Congress within 15 days.
    - immibis · 276 days ago
      People who they think will do this don't get to be redactors. It's all about power and relationships, not technology.
    - exe34 · 276 days ago
      Given how MTG went completely silent despite her high profile platform, I'm guessing the civil (or at this point, royal) servants don't want their families harmed.
- johnys · 277 days ago
  Yeah, there’s a ton of information. https://epsteinsecrets.com/network is another tool to pursue the data dumps.
- Alex3917 · 277 days 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.
  - jonathanstrange · 277 days 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?
    - randall · 277 days ago
      it is not. gmail is 100% from paul bucheit.
      - Alex3917 · 277 days ago
        He wasn't sitting there writing binary code and implementing all 7 layers of the OSI stack by hand, he was was gluing together pre-existing components. And the pre-existing components he had access to include two major email startups acquired by Google in 2001 and 2003, which were founded in 1995 and 1997 respectively. (Although he does have at least two patents for features and algorithms he co-invented while making Gmail.)
        estebank · 276 days ago
        If I invite you to a barbeque and tell you I made lunch, will you tell me off because I didn't raise and butcher the cow?
        toyg · 276 days ago
        This is more like using a sauce that someone else made.
    - wordpad · 277 days 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 · 277 days 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 · 277 days 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.
        HeWhoLurksLate · 277 days ago
        https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/18-956_d18f.pdf I mean it has happened in other Google products...
      - dboreham · 277 days ago
        Even "just smtp" isn't trivial.
        pshirshov · 276 days ago
        It is, or was at least. At the age of 13, I've created one for Windows. It was relatively widely used at the time.
    - esseph · 277 days ago
      Gmail is not just a mail client.
      - ape4 · 277 days ago
        The spam checker alone is an ton of work. It needs to handle millions of mails for millions of users a day.
        sgjohnson · 277 days ago
        Nitpick: pretty sure both of those are in the billions. Mails could even be in the trillions.
    - Alex3917 · 276 days ago
      > Did they buy some code for Gmail from an older company? They bought both Deja and Neotonic.
  - 113 · 277 days 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.
    - sheepscreek · 277 days ago
      Most *nix tools have their origins in the ‘70s-80s. Email as a technology is ancient by today’s standards. SMTP protocol got established in 1982. Even sendmail dates as far back as the ‘70s.
      - Alex3917 · 277 days ago
        This is a pretty good talk on the history of email: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrGfahzt-4Q
        doctorpangloss · 277 days ago
        https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/20... Another great article
      - deathslocus · 277 days ago
        And the earlier technology of homing pigeons goes back even further
    - inquirerGeneral · 277 days ago
      It's Reddit type conversation often
    - zahlman · 277 days ago
      Could it instead be that less technically inclined people feel more empowered to hang out here?
      - DrewADesign · 277 days ago
        Maybe that and manipulating technical tools requires far less background knowledge than it did, meaning the definition of “technically inclined” has shifted, as it often does.
      - g947o · 276 days ago
        "less technically inclined" doesn't mean people can make whatever incorrect claims unchecked like on reddit, where you get banned because you post inconvenient facts in the wrong sub. And this is exactly why I stopped participating in discussions on reddit and never on LinkedIn. Discussions on HN are so much civil and respectful here P.S. if the top level comment was indeed posted by a "less technically inclined" person, I hope this is a humbling, positive educational experience, at least that's how I would take it
  - bryanrasmussen · 277 days ago
    I mean it is so obvious causing me to find the use of the phrase cloned so weird that I feel it needs to be said. The UI cloning doesn't feel exactly correct either there are things that are slightly off. But I just find the "cloned" wrong, because obviously you cannot send an email from this account, you cannot log in to the service as Jeffrey Epstein, you cannot delete emails, create alerts based on searches, do actions on selected emails (create new tag, move under that tag) there are so many functionalities that are not cloned because obviously they could not be cloned because they would make no sense for what this project is. So just the praise for cloning so quickly makes me sort of mad. You could theoretically make something like this that allowed log in so you got a personalized epstein mails, and then could do all that, and perhaps get more mails sent in as files get released, and perhaps create Google alerts on epstein in the news etc. that would come as mails and maybe the code could put news that came in, into the appropriate the tags etc. But until that time "cloned" is just very wrong.
    - DonHopkins · 276 days ago
      For the holidays, they should at least implement a Shockingly Distasteful Jeffrey Epstein Christmas Card Meme Generator.
  - a-dub · 277 days ago
    > 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. no. google did not exist until the late 90s. various forms of internet email sure did, but most popular mtas of the google era shared very little code with predecessors from the 80s and early 90s (maybe sendmail) and google almost certainly wrote their own from scratch. but your first point. that an archive browser that looks like gmail is not equivalent to a full tilt email service backend is valid.
  - nntwozz · 277 days ago
    Why stop there, I'm sure you can trace Gmail all the way back to the Roman aqueducts.
    - AntiqueFig · 277 days ago
      I mean technically if we didn't have Roman aqueducts, would we have Gmail today?
      - bregma · 276 days ago
        All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system, public health, and GMail what have the Romans ever done for us?
        DonHopkins · 276 days ago
        All right, but apart from Google Wave, Google Reader, Google+, Inbox, Stadia, Project Ara, Google Glass, Loon, Picasa, Orkut, Hangouts, Allo, Duo, Google Domains, Google Health, Google Notebook, iGoogle, Knol, Jaiku, Daydream VR, Google Play Music, Nexus, Fusion Tables, Bump, Revolv, Songza, QuickOffice, Meebo, Panoramio, Milk, Schemer, Sparrow, Poly, Tilt Brush, Tour Builder, URL Shortener, Latitude, Spaces, Google Hire, Google Bulletin, Shoelace, and Neighbourly, Android Things, Project Tango, Ara Module Marketplace, Google TV, Nexus Q, Google Play Newsstand, Google Play Movies & TV, Google Podcasts, Google Now, Google Now Launcher, Google Goggles, Gesture Search, MyTracks, Google Play Edition, Android Auto for Phone Screens, All Access, Google Currents, Google SMS Search, Google Cloud Messaging, Android Beam, Androidify, Field Trip, Google Currents, and Google Play Artist Hub, what has Google ever done for us?
        LightBug1 · 276 days ago
        I'm a little out of the loop. Are any of those still active projects?
        DonHopkins · 276 days ago
        Not a one. ;) https://killedbygoogle.com/
    - ithkuil · 276 days ago
      The Link Between a Horse's Arse and the Space Shuttle • Physics Forums https://share.google/UnmMwwQv9kyksKhkI
      - ThePowerOfFuet · 276 days ago
        Tracking-free link: https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/the-link-between-a-hor...
      - freedomben · 276 days ago
        I'm not a physicist, but after getting into the rotten fruit this fall, I would bet my friend's horse could launch a space shuttle from her arse. Such a sweet mare, but she has no hesitation blasting Venetian atmosphere right into your face while you're scraping the shit out of her feet. At least she has the decency to make eye contact while doing it
    - Alex3917 · 276 days ago
      I mean the I would really only include the code for things like: - Fetching email messages - Parsing email headers - Mime parsing - Converting the text of email bodies into UTF-8 - Threading messages - Eliding reply text Given that the official story is that pb made the first version of Gmail in a day, does anyone actually believe that he wrote the code for any of those things in a day? If you honestly believe that I have a bridge to sell you. Wait till you learn that the source code in Chrome also predates the existence of Google.
    - DonHopkins · 276 days ago
      At least to the Black Death.
- JKCalhoun · 277 days ago
  "…there's a lot to sift through…" A job for an LLM…
- wayeq · 277 days ago
  > - 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. if only there were some kind of universal summary engine that never gets tired and is essentially free.
- tonyhart7 · 277 days ago
  "whole suite of products in a short period of time that cost millions of dollars." but they just copy the "UI" not the whole product
- huntertwo · 276 days ago
  > 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. Jared kushner, is that you?
  - elif · 276 days ago
    Thinking Gmail costs "millions to develop" sounds exactly like the kind of price unawareness that comes from that family. I would bet the Gmail team has single employee salaries in that range.
    - stanfordkid · 276 days ago
      To be fair, millions could be hundreds of millions.
      - elif · 276 days ago
        Sure. And you are inches tall.
    - an0malous · 276 days ago
      What do these million dollar salary employees at Gmail do?
      - Den_VR · 276 days ago
        Three things, not all of which any specific employee does: 1. Fix security issues 2. Create “features” in order to seem useful that the world was better without 3. Rest upon laurels of gmail from 15 years ago
      - d4mi3n · 276 days ago
        Make Google multiple millions by improving ad delivery and conversion within Gmail. Probably by also helping Google land big corporate or public contracts, but last I checked most of the money was made via ads in the free tier of GMail.
  - dang · 276 days ago
    Please don't be snarky or post shallow internet tropes. We're trying for something else here. You're welcome, of course, to make your substantive points thoughtfully. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - huntertwo · 276 days ago
      It’s ok, it follows the rules - I made the comment very thoughtfully and it is indeed substantive. It’s also not snarky and isn’t a shallow internet trope.
      - dang · 276 days ago
        Interpretations can differ, of course, but I don't think this was a borderline call.
- qoez · 276 days ago
  Well there's only 2500 emails here. They definitely had time to sift through these to make sure friends weren't mentioned.
  - parpfish · 276 days ago
    Regardless, it seems like they used the Ctrl-a key to speed up redacting
  - jdironman · 276 days ago
    I read through 80% of them last night by myself. I mean, I didn't go to bed until 3am but spread across a handful of agents? yeah you could do it in an hour.
- Bender · 276 days ago
  there's a lot to sift through The total archive size is 300GB. AFAIK they have only released around 2GB. Curious what is in the rest of it assuming it does not get [redacted] out or deleted. I am also curious how they intend to release the rest of it in time to meet the requirements of the act. Discussion [1] Epstein Files bill sponsor Ro Khanna and Hassan, no dogs being zapped . [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KT2u0Fp3hQg [video][1hr12m]
  - sh34r · 273 days ago
    > Curious what is in the rest of it Probably a lot of CSAM, if the Mossad blackmail op theory of Epstein is true.
    - Bender · 272 days ago
      Maybe. I keep hearing that yet all I've seen are teens that would have been legal in several US states. Given they did not correctly redact the PDF's perhaps there will be some hints to actual children having been involved.
- amelius · 276 days 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. The cynic in me would assume that someone with a lot of money wants to hide some of the emails and the best way to do that (at this point) is to release them filtered with a great UI.
  - brookst · 276 days ago
    That’s not cynicism, it’s conspiracy theorism. That leads you to “the whole Epstein thing is a hoax designed to distract from what’s really going on”.
    - amelius · 276 days ago
      No, because the hypothesis is relatively easily falsifiable. This does not hold for conspiracy theories.
      - wizzwizz4 · 276 days ago
        Would you like to do the work of falsifying it? (Since you made the claim, and posted it online, I'd argue you have some responsibility to do so.)
    - jdironman · 276 days ago
      The thing I got from reading the majority of these emails is Epstein / trump connection was not that strong later years. I feel JE humored trump to a degree and disliked him to an even larger degree. He may have initially had strong relations in the beginning but he was NOT pleased he was winning the presidency at all. He mentioned multiple times references to dirt on DT and even at one point there was the question did Trump set him up. Not to say JE did no wrong, cause the evidence is 100% there for that but it's super interesting having read the actual files to see the various media spins on all sides. If anything though it's led me to believe there are much stronger ties to Russia with DT than I thought before. (Palm Beach House, the casino, models coming from those areas etc).
      - mlrtime · 275 days ago
        What evidence of doing wrong exactly? Is there non circumstantial evidence?
- the_arun · 276 days ago
  They also have “promotions” tab listing all promo content. I wonder is this real or mock data.
- downboots · 276 days ago
  > it's likely even the government couldn't sift through all of them How could you tell?
sweca · 277 days ago
Jemini is such a nice touch
andrewinardeer · 277 days ago
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46004118
- dvrp · 277 days ago
  just link dupe, but not content dupe read rest of the thread with more context on why
ok123456 · 277 days ago
https://www.jmail.world/thread/HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_026632?email=... Nice using self-emails as a knowledge base.
- dvrp · 276 days ago
  lol
amarant · 277 days 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?
- medler · 277 days 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
  - wahnfrieden · 277 days ago
    Images were also planted that were not part of the files.
    - epistasis · 277 days ago
      Planted by whom? That were not part of the files? That seems dubious at best. What is your source? It doesn't even make sense.
      - dboreham · 277 days ago
        Makes sense if you are a criminal.
      - 9dev · 276 days ago
        There is a picture of Bill Clinton with Michael Jackson and Diana Ross that was just publicly available before: https://www.threads.com/@meidastouch/post/DSfEKJslM1H It doesn't belong into the Epstein Files, and doesn't need to be censored either, but the way it is framed in the DoJ release implies guilt where there is none.
        _heimdall · 276 days ago
        How can you be sure the image wasn't part of the files collected during investigation? What makes you so sure Epstein didn't have the file saved somewhere on a device, server, or account that was collected?
        9dev · 276 days ago
        I don’t think I expressed a particular opinion here, I just stated where the suspicion comes from. That being said, I think we can demand a level of due diligence from public institutions that entails only censoring actual victims on actual pieces of evidence, instead of mindlessly placing black squares on the faces of news article pictures found on his computer. Nevermind that nobody can explain yet how this particular picture ended up in the grand jury files anyway.
        goatlover · 276 days ago
        This is the same DOJ that released the edited Epstein jail video as "raw", with the attorney general claiming the missing minute was from how the video system reset for a new day, when they had the actual raw video with the missing minute.
    - edm0nd · 277 days ago
      Surely you can link me to the exact "planted" images you are talking about... who planted them?
      - Zambyte · 277 days ago
        https://bsky.app/profile/meidastouch.com/post/3mag7myutmc2d Here's at least one notable image.
        Arn_Thor · 277 days ago
        That's not the exact same image, though. It's a separate image, from the same time and place. The one released may have been in Epstein's possession and therefore part of the files. Either some DoJ drone just redacted all children and non-celebrities due to procedure, or it was deliberately done in such a way as to make Clinton and Jackson look suspicious. Whatever the reason, this was not a Getty stock image planted in the files.
        Zambyte · 276 days ago
        You can see the erroneously redacted image here: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8r38ne1x2mo
        Amezarak · 276 days ago
        It wasn’t erroneous. The DoJ said they were redacting the faces of all non-celebrity women and children under the presumption they could be victims.
        Arn_Thor · 275 days ago
        In that case it makes perfect sense
        Arn_Thor · 275 days ago
        I know what picture we're talking about. 1) it's not the same as the Getty stock image everyone seems to mistake it for. 2) we don't know if the redaction is erroneous or intentionally misleading, but either way the non-celebrity faces were redacted even though another image of them exists in the public domain. Probably easier to just apply a blanket policy when handling all these images rather than observing edge cases.
        wahnfrieden · 275 days ago
        The redaction is a distraction. The concern is that it is from a charity event that is seemingly unrelated to Epstein
        Arn_Thor · 274 days ago
        If Epstein had the photo in his possession, then that would explain why it's there!
- lukeigel · 277 days 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.
  - mikeyouse · 277 days 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.
    - dvrp · 277 days ago
      big motivation for the whole project is to help structure the mess that was released
    - lukeigel · 276 days ago
      Another person made an oddly beautiful ASCII ui for the text messages. All seem to be from HOUSE_OVERSIGHT (we have those plus DOJ, YAHOO. No dedicated text UI from us) https://michelcrypt4d4mus.github.io/epstein_text_messages/ He also shouted us out last month which was very kind of him
  - cobertos · 277 days 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.
    - lukeigel · 276 days ago
      Re: the DOJ emails prefixed with "EFTA", I have no idea how over-redacted they are. They definitely seem dubious though. Re: the DDoSecrets emails though (YAHOO dataset), I have more to share. Drop Site News agreed to give us access to the Yahoo dataset discovered by DDoSecrets, but on the condition that we help redact it. It's a completely unfiltered dataset. It's literally just .eml files for jeeprojects@yahoo.com. It includes many attached documents. There is no illegal imagery, but it has photos of Epstein's extended family (nephews, nieces, etc) and headshots of many models that Epstein's executive assistant would send to him. I was quite shocked that this thing existed. We built some internal redaction tools that the Drop Site team is now using to comb through all of this. We've released 5 batches of the Yahoo mail now, with the 1k+ Amazon receipts being the most recent. A few thoughts on how we do redaction are here: https://www.jmail.world/about . Unlike the DOJ, we've tried to minimize the ambiguity about what was redacted. For example: all redacted images are replaced with a Gemini-generated description of that photograph. Another example: we are aggressively redacting email addresses and phone numbers of normal people to avoid spamming them. Perhaps others would leave it all in, but Riley and I don't want to be responsible for these people's lives getting disrupted by this entire saga. For example, we redacted this guy's email but not his name: https://www.jmail.world/thread/4accfb5f3ed84656e9762740081a4... Riley and I were not expecting this type of scope when we first dropped Jmail. Jmail is an interesting side project for us, and this new dataset requires full-time attention. Thankfully we have help though. We're happy to take on this responsibility given how helpful, thoughtful and careful both the Drop Site and DDoSecrets team has been here.
      - cobertos · 276 days ago
        I appreciate the links and transparency. Answers a lot of my questions. Thanks
- jibal · 277 days 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...
- mkoubaa · 276 days ago
  The most incriminating stuff isn't censored, it's been completely destroyed by now
kevin_thibedeau · 277 days ago
Wonder how much that Clinton in a blue dress painting will go for.
rynn · 277 days ago
Where did you get all the data? The justice.gov site didn’t have a mass download option that I could find.
- slazien · 277 days ago
  https://www.jmail.world/about "We compiled these Epstein estate emails from the House Oversight Committee release by converting the PDFs to structured text with an LLM" and: "Data Sources Gmail emails: House Oversight Committee Yahoo emails: DDoSecrets (brought to us by Drop Site News) Technology Document parsing and extraction powered by reducto"
  - dvrp · 277 days ago
    Yes, also many were PPM images (or encoded as such) in PDFs and then I used (cheap/light) multimodal LLMs to classify documents from photos. It was surprisingly cheap: <$1 for a few thousand PDFs / Images.
sieep · 277 days 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.
novoreorx · 277 days ago
.world domain is a perfectly fit for this project, love to see more power brokers' profile joining this Jmail world
randall · 277 days ago
this is amazing
umrashrf · 277 days ago
That's definitely more than 15 GB of free space given by Google! Great work!
- dvrp · 276 days ago
  gaussian splats alone are >500GBs lol (lot of bad quality ones though)
stocksinsmocks · 277 days 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.
- gosub100 · 277 days ago
  He has tshirts and hats that say "mossad" on them
  - vnchr · 277 days ago
    He ordered Israeli Defense Force pants off of Amazon apparently: https://www.jmail.world/thread/a767cba6e082256743a1069708a4a... He also ordered like 9 pairs of Crocs. He really liked the fuzzy lined Crocs: https://www.jmail.world/search?q=Crocs
    - stocksinsmocks · 277 days ago
      You can’t be at the top of your child selling and money laundering game if your feet hurt.
tacker2000 · 277 days 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.
- mastermedo · 277 days ago
  ditto for email. Usually I open one email on the phone and slide left-right or right-left to navigate between adjacent emails.
lifestyleguru · 277 days 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.
InMice · 277 days 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
- lukeigel · 277 days ago
  Thank you! The night before launching the original Jmail we had this hunch that jump-straight-to-end and "random page" would make the site work for people.
anjel · 277 days ago
Way better than the DOJ UI but a pity the photo captions got stripped away
- dvrp · 276 days ago
  what photo captions? are you talking about OpenGraph metadata or something else that we can fix?
ned_roberts · 277 days ago
Search for “LSJ”: Little Saint James, his island.
tonymet · 277 days ago
Because of JDate it took a minute to realize JMail stood for Jeffrey
- userbinator · 277 days ago
  You made me imagine an alternate universe where there is a Jeffrey programming language and the man is named Java Epstein.
20k · 277 days ago
Great project, thanks for building it >i want you to realize that that dog that hasn't barked is trump.. virignia spent hours at my house with him,, he has never once been mentioned. police chief. etc. im 75 % there Hooo boy
gosub100 · 277 days ago
Lots of Bill Gates involvement, and Sergey Brin.
dabluecaboose · 277 days ago
Hey OP, just FYI "in lieu of" means "instead of". You probably meant to use "in light of"
- OJFord · 276 days ago
  In the absence of
B1FF_PSUVM · 277 days ago
The flight log data + visualizer is interesting. Apparently not into crossing the equator ... P.S. feel like a private eye perusing the Amazon purchases. Nabokov and Nietzsche, oh my.
dash2 · 277 days ago
Even just setting aside the criminal/salacious side... it is just so interesting to see the connections between the elite. Steve Bannon photographed chilling with Noam Chomsky, such a surprise. God, and Robert Trivers is in there too, eeh.
- unreal6 · 277 days ago
  Bannon for a while was deeply ingrained in Hollywood. He still earns residuals on episodes of Seinfeld [0], and owns the film rights to Michael Lewis' Liars Poker (even supposedly writing a screenplay for it himself) [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Bannon#Media_and_investi... [1] https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/movies/articles/steve-ba...
  - sigwinch · 276 days ago
    He was very close to Epstein. So far as I know, the only mention of Bannon at Turning Point USA was a call to release the 12-15 hours of taped media training he gave Epstein in 2019.
- el3ctron · 276 days ago
  correct me please if i am missing something, but i read that Chomsky messages and looks like normal conversations, i mean, surely Epstein offered dark services for some guest, but not for all. Even that conversations looks very smart. Social media people moves in majority cases on morbid assumptions. Correct me please if i am missing something, but Chomsky is a great guy, an one of the greatest minds on earth.
  - tnecio · 276 days ago
    Well you might like Chomsky's ideas but can you say that you really know him? If no, then how can you be so sure of his character? Even if he was not involved in any of Epstein's illegal activities, a leftist individual secretly hanging out with billionaires on a secluded island is not a good look to say the least
  - butlike · 275 days ago
    A lot of it feels like mundane "life-living" with some salacious stuff in there.
- leonvoss · 276 days ago
  > it is just so interesting to see the connections between the elite. Did you imagine rich and successful, high status people hang out with random wage workers they find in a bar somewhere in the midwest?
dash2 · 277 days ago
I would be interested to hear HN views on Richard Hanania's take on Epstein: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/the-inverted-reality-of-eps... .
- thasFqr12 · 277 days ago
  Michael Tracey, who influenced Hanania, has been on a wild crusade against all Epstein victims and has tried to discredit them. He also avoids all intelligence connections. He never asks why Epstein got the job at Bear Stearns after leaving as a teacher at an expensive private school where William Barr's father was the headmaster. He never publishes material like the officially released birthday book entry from Eliot Wolk, trader at Bear Stearns, who confirmed that Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine's father, had an account at Bear Stearns and who teased Epstein about knowing teenage Ghislaine. So it is now officially confirmed that Epstein knew Robert and Ghislaine much earlier than previously known. And that he knew Robert in the Iran Contra years where Robert was dealing with Adnan Khashoggi. Tracey and Hanania are doing extremely poor journalistic work here by just focusing on the subset of Epstein victims that were over 18 and took money for the services. Not reporting at all on the intelligence connections seems suspect as well.
  - linhns · 277 days ago
    Tracey seems to me to be a dishonest broker that is paid to promote anti-interventionist and related agenda
- kg · 277 days ago
  "Especially since the MeToo era began, we’re too credulous about these things. So we have globs of money going to Epstein accusers and their lawyers, while nothing has ever been proved by the standards of the criminal justice system." Feels like someone with an axe to grind over MeToo turning Jeffrey Epstein of all people (???) into a martyr figure for their pet issue. I don't know why someone would feel compelled to defend him when he's not even alive to thank you for it. The idea that vast amounts of evidence and accusations exist yet nothing bad happened whatsoever is so wildly implausible that I can't grasp the mindset that would lead to openly publishing this perspective on Epstein. We found out from the most recent disclosures that people reported Epstein's inappropriate behavior to the FBI as early as 1996 and it wasn't investigated. One need only look at the amount of detail on his Wikipedia page ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Epstein#First_criminal... ) to get a sense of why accusations against him are at least treated as credible. I totally get not finding this issue interesting or not caring about what he did to his victims, though I can't really empathize with that position, I understand it. But writing like Hanania's feels beyond the pale and unnecessary.
  - zzrrt · 277 days ago
    >> nothing has ever been proved by the standards of the criminal justice system This flabbergasted me at first. Admittedly I had to refresh my memory that he died in jail awaiting trial, but he was still convicted once before that! The fact it was pre-MeToo should make it more damning, per his logic. I guess he’s saying there were no convictions after he became infamous, but there’s a caveat that he died awaiting trial, and that plus the prior conviction just makes this statement seem disingenuous or sloppy at best.
  - runako · 276 days ago
    > nothing has ever been proved by the standards of the criminal justice system One of my #1 things about reading people's writing is that while everybody is allowed to make mistakes, making this kind of easily-verifiable falsehood a central plank of an argument is discrediting. I honestly don't know why people keep reading him. There are better thinkers and writers who will also tell you that women and people of color are subhuman, he's not the only outlet for that point of view if that's what you're looking to read.
- runako · 276 days ago
  Anyone who writes a newsletter and hosts a broadcast in defense of Epstein's child sex trafficking ring probably should be under some kind of enhanced scrutiny. Please keep in mind that the Epstein case was argued in open federal court, where he was found guilty and was sentenced. When he died, there were further criminal proceedings pending in two countries. Hanania's habit of seeing everything in the binary of "woke" vs "not woke" leads him to some incredibly questionable places, as evidenced here. It's "woke" to believe that a convicted child sex trafficker resumed his crimes when released from prison, so Hanania is ideologically forced to take the opposite view that the kerfuffle is mostly hysterics. I honestly don't know why people read him, the quality of thinking and analysis is simply not there. There are much better conservative writers out there who are not currently apologizing for child rapists.
  - leonvoss · 276 days ago
    Epstein was definitely guilty of prostituting, at least for himself, girls between 14 and 17 years old. I personally think young women of that age should know better than to be prostitutes for rich guys, and there's no evidence he ever coerced them to do anything. He lured them purely with money and promises of status. There is plenty of testimony of the girls refusing to touch him and they leave, often with money still in-hand and an offer to come back with more girls. They should know they are themselves "child sex traffickers" if they come back with their underaged friends, and they themselves should have been prosecuted along with Epstein and Maxwell.
    - runako · 276 days ago
      I am not a lawyer, but I am fairly confident that this is not how the laws currently work.
      - leonvoss · 276 days ago
        Teenage girls cannot currently be charged with illegal sex acts when they sleep with older men, but they can be charged with "child sex trafficking" when they offend against other teenage girls.
chirau · 277 days ago
I clicked on attachments, then images. There are only 9 images in this whole release?
- dvrp · 276 days ago
  weird — there’s thousands we should bugfix which url did you do that? can you help repro?
- tomtomtom777 · 276 days ago
  Instead of attachment, click on the second tab on top of the screen.
- lukeigel · 276 days ago
  Sorry about that. That Attachments tab shows you literal attachments found in the .eml files from the YAHOO dataset. We have released very few .emls that have attachments though. Expect more and more over time. Releasing YAHOO responsibly has been time consuming, and we're relying on Drop Site to tackle the redactions. See this post for context. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46347272
mrinfinite · 277 days ago
Its cool to see the mail. I now think he did die absolutely.. i had a suspicion he didnt.. but him and chomsky are fucking retarded.. feels like scrolling through twitter for horrible handles trying to sound smart and just lil bitches.. It makes me happier that my work is not very smart, but compared to these guys we arent that bad. I mean he was a geopolitical analyst. he may have been book smart in some sense cause he ordered liebniz at some pont.. but also just sounded like he was super high (probably wasnt)... very surprsing..
SilentM68 · 277 days ago
Hmm, no mention of BTC origins :(