As someone from the other side of the pond, I have to ask: what do people expect from all of this?
It feels like this is a big smoke screen used by the current admin, first to be reelected, and now to distract people from what they are actually doing (like repeating they decreased drugs price by 600%, that they ended dozens of wars while dropping bombs daily all around the World...).
It also looks like it allows everyone to peek in other's people lives, which feels quite disturbing.
Sure, some of them were/are terrible people.
But there's also the victims here.
Furthermore, is it how justice should work?
Share everything to the world, and let everyone make their own judgement based on what they see?
Is there going to be some actual outcome? Both for the victims and for their offenders?
Or is it just a show where everyone can see them as detective/judge?
Just to add a bit more context: after years of trials, one of our former President finally went to jail for a few weeks.
And now, they're invited by media all over the country so they can complain about how unfair it was, they published a book about it, sold in the tens of thousands, their son is the new TV's favorite...
So I'm wondering: is it actual justice at work, or just a distraction while nothing change and nobody is actually held accountable?
It's interesting to see where the "too famous to prosecute" line lies. So far the highest profile casualty seems to have been Prince Andrew - as a result of the files, and NOT as a result of his actual court case with Virginia Giuffre, which he settled before her suicide.
Maybe it's possible. Berlusconi was brought down by his habit of young women eventually hitting one under 18.
I think for the duration of this four year term, at the very least, nothing will happen. But there's a bit of hope (possibly cope) that if these people accept an election loss in 2028 and voters keep this anger going, people involved may be charged and imprisoned.
History shows that it never happens in America and politicians always drop the "it's time for our nation to heal" line, but if the pendulum swings as far in the other direction as it did in the 2024 election, maybe things will be different. And the only hope of that happening is for people to stay pissed.
One thing I will say is the outrage about this has lasted longer than I initially imagined. America has had a lot of "this controversy won't be forgotten!" stuff that nobody remembers 2 months later. In contrast, I feel like this has been steadily ramping up and maintaining some degree of inertia for 2 years. Will it burn out by 2028? Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised. It was washed out of the news by trans people playing sports and that was somehow the biggest issue in the world. 2028 will undoubtedly have some weird "problem" that we can't yet imagine.
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.
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.
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
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!!
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.
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!
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
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
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
> - 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.
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.
Anyone reading thru these and filtering out the promotion spam should consider taking a look thru. All his Amazon orders, which mostly are uninteresting sure, but scattered in there are books and eBook purchases dealing with some relevant and interesting-in-context topics.
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
This is incredibly fascinating, not just because of who he was and the crimes he committed, but to see all this information on a specific person in one place is surreal.
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.
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].
This is incredible. How are you hosting all this? There's got to be considerable cost. Meanwhile, this is a genuinely great way to browse through all these files. Seriously impressive work.
A lot of the files are hosted on Cloudflare so their $0 egress cost helps a lot. Especially given that so many of the files can be considered immutable assets, so we can configure aggressive caching.
I know that Luke was working on stuff so as not to hit the database as much, but I was in the middle of a flight as that was happening so he'll have to come and provide more details.
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.
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.
Most of the mails read like fake ones from a video game. Maybe it's because most of them were written by an older generation who uses more classic letter-style writing.
>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
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
"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.
>> 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.
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.
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!
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.
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..
As someone from the other side of the pond, I have to ask: what do people expect from all of this?
It feels like this is a big smoke screen used by the current admin, first to be reelected, and now to distract people from what they are actually doing (like repeating they decreased drugs price by 600%, that they ended dozens of wars while dropping bombs daily all around the World...).
It also looks like it allows everyone to peek in other's people lives, which feels quite disturbing. Sure, some of them were/are terrible people. But there's also the victims here. Furthermore, is it how justice should work? Share everything to the world, and let everyone make their own judgement based on what they see?
Is there going to be some actual outcome? Both for the victims and for their offenders?
Or is it just a show where everyone can see them as detective/judge?
Just to add a bit more context: after years of trials, one of our former President finally went to jail for a few weeks. And now, they're invited by media all over the country so they can complain about how unfair it was, they published a book about it, sold in the tens of thousands, their son is the new TV's favorite...
So I'm wondering: is it actual justice at work, or just a distraction while nothing change and nobody is actually held accountable?
There needs to be a RICO case on the entire criminal abuse network which operated as an open secret for over three decades.
Andrew Windsor needs to be extradited to the US and face trial.
We need a referendum about whether we want child rape to be a tool of US policy. I say no.
It's interesting to see where the "too famous to prosecute" line lies. So far the highest profile casualty seems to have been Prince Andrew - as a result of the files, and NOT as a result of his actual court case with Virginia Giuffre, which he settled before her suicide.
Maybe it's possible. Berlusconi was brought down by his habit of young women eventually hitting one under 18.
I think for the duration of this four year term, at the very least, nothing will happen. But there's a bit of hope (possibly cope) that if these people accept an election loss in 2028 and voters keep this anger going, people involved may be charged and imprisoned.
History shows that it never happens in America and politicians always drop the "it's time for our nation to heal" line, but if the pendulum swings as far in the other direction as it did in the 2024 election, maybe things will be different. And the only hope of that happening is for people to stay pissed.
One thing I will say is the outrage about this has lasted longer than I initially imagined. America has had a lot of "this controversy won't be forgotten!" stuff that nobody remembers 2 months later. In contrast, I feel like this has been steadily ramping up and maintaining some degree of inertia for 2 years. Will it burn out by 2028? Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised. It was washed out of the news by trans people playing sports and that was somehow the biggest issue in the world. 2028 will undoubtedly have some weird "problem" that we can't yet imagine.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Images were also planted to falsely suggest incriminating evidence.
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!!
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.
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!
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
The post you link to is deleted.
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
> 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.
Why stop there, I'm sure you can trace Gmail all the way back to the Roman aqueducts.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/18-956_d18f.pdf
I mean it has happened in other Google products...
Even "just smtp" isn't trivial.
it is not. gmail is 100% from paul bucheit.
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.)
Gmail is not just a mail client.
The spam checker alone is an ton of work. It needs to handle millions of mails for millions of users a day.
Nitpick: pretty sure both of those are in the billions.
Mails could even be in the trillions.
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.
Could it instead be that less technically inclined people feel more empowered to hang out here?
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.
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.
This is a pretty good talk on the history of email: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrGfahzt-4Q
https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/20...
Another great article
And the earlier technology of homing pigeons goes back even further
It's Reddit type conversation often
"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
"…there's a lot to sift through…"
A job for an LLM…
Yeah, there’s a ton of information. https://epsteinsecrets.com/network is another tool to pursue the data dumps.
> - 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.
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.
Never trust anyone with a network setup like this... https://www.jmail.world/photos?photo=EFTA00002627-0
Anyone reading thru these and filtering out the promotion spam should consider taking a look thru. All his Amazon orders, which mostly are uninteresting sure, but scattered in there are books and eBook purchases dealing with some relevant and interesting-in-context topics.
Also, interesting that this one got by him (unopened, unread, filtered from inbox) and the timing of it being near his final arrest (coincidence, but still) https://www.jmail.world/eml/0b80588f551f3d097695f1c9507b6572
We're also working to have a RAG system on Jemini so you can talk to the files. many of the files have been embedded into vectors thru turbopuffer.
RAG doesn't have to be vectors. You can also make a regular full text search and it's gonna be RAG.
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
This is incredibly fascinating, not just because of who he was and the crimes he committed, but to see all this information on a specific person in one place is surreal.
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.
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...
Hey OP, just FYI "in lieu of" means "instead of".
You probably meant to use "in light of"
This is incredible. How are you hosting all this? There's got to be considerable cost. Meanwhile, this is a genuinely great way to browse through all these files. Seriously impressive work.
A lot of the files are hosted on Cloudflare so their $0 egress cost helps a lot. Especially given that so many of the files can be considered immutable assets, so we can configure aggressive caching.
I know that Luke was working on stuff so as not to hit the database as much, but I was in the middle of a flight as that was happening so he'll have to come and provide more details.
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.
What benefit do you get from the splat-ification? Surely any relevant details are visible in the original jpegs?
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.
The "Quora Digest" email killed me.
Most of the mails read like fake ones from a video game. Maybe it's because most of them were written by an older generation who uses more classic letter-style writing.
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
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?
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.
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.
big motivation for the whole project is to help structure the mess that was released
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.
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
Images were also planted that were not part of the files.
Surely you can link me to the exact "planted" images you are talking about...
who planted them?
https://bsky.app/profile/meidastouch.com/post/3mag7myutmc2d
Here's at least one notable image.
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.
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.
Makes sense if you are a criminal.
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...
That's definitely more than 15 GB of free space given by Google! Great work!
Way better than the DOJ UI but a pity the photo captions got stripped away
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.
See also:
- JPhotos: https://www.jmail.world/photos
- JDrive: https://www.jmail.world/drive
- JAmazon: https://www.jmail.world/jamazon
No way. Next level.
.world domain is a perfectly fit for this project, love to see more power brokers' profile joining this Jmail world
Where did you get all the data? The justice.gov site didn’t have a mass download option that I could find.
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
TechnologyDocument parsing and extraction powered by reducto"
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.
https://www.jmail.world/thread/HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_026632?email=...
Nice using self-emails as a knowledge base.
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.
ditto for email. Usually I open one email on the phone and slide left-right or right-left to navigate between adjacent emails.
Jemini is such a nice touch
I clicked on attachments, then images. There are only 9 images in this whole release?
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.
He has tshirts and hats that say "mossad" on them
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
You can’t be at the top of your child selling and money laundering game if your feet hurt.
Shoot I wish I would've have known there was a collab, would've loved to participate in this.
cody rudland is a hero
The back button doesn't work
In which app? Photos, email, etc? Tested across each.
Also which platform? Mobile? I’ve noticed some burger menus failing on mobile.
Search for “LSJ”: Little Saint James, his island.
Hmm, no mention of BTC origins :(
amazing
Wonder how much that Clinton in a blue dress painting will go for.
Because of JDate it took a minute to realize JMail stood for Jeffrey
You made me imagine an alternate universe where there is a Jeffrey programming language and the man is named Java Epstein.
cool stuff boys
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....
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.
Tracey seems to me to be a dishonest broker that is paid to promote anti-interventionist and related agenda
"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.
>> 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.
the J suite of products grows larger
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.
Lots of Bill Gates involvement, and Sergey Brin.
this is amazing
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.
serch for lolli or cp smh this guy was trash
Discussion (144 points, 29 days ago, 11 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46004118
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.
Is data about how long links are on the front page available publicly anywhere?
There are a number of third party sites that do this, such as hnrankings.info:
https://hnrankings.info/46339600/
https://hnrankings.info/46004118/
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!
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.
Riley Walz is a spook who 100% has ties with intelligence, maybe use a more objective platform to sort through these resources.
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.
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..
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46004118
just link dupe, but not content dupe
read rest of the thread with more context on why