Show HN: Epstein's emails reconstructed in a message-style UI (OCR and LLMs)

2 days ago (github.com)

This project reconstructs the Epstein email records from the recent U.S. House Oversight Committee releases using only public-domain documents (23,124 image files + 2,800 OCR text files).

Most email pages contain only one real message, buried under layers of repeated headers/footers. I wanted to rebuild the conversations without all the surrounding noise.

I used an OCR + vision-LLM pipeline to extract individual messages from the email screenshots, normalize senders/recipients, rebuild timestamps, detect duplicates, and map threads. The output is a structured SQLite database that runs client-side via SQL.js (WebAssembly).

The repository includes the full extraction pipeline, data cleaning scripts, schema, limitations, and implementation notes. The interface is a lightweight PWA that displays the reconstructed messages in a phone-style UI, with links back to every original source image for verification.

Live demo: https://epsteinsphone.org

All source data is from the official public releases; no leaks or private material.

Happy to answer questions about the pipeline, LLM extraction, threading logic, or the PWA implementation.

8 comments

toon-noot

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dizhn  2 days ago

Android/Firefox. Nothing's happening when I tap the icons on the demo site.

  • toon-noot  2 days ago

    Thanks for the feedback. i'll try to reproduce. I spent more time with the data pipeline then with testing the UI across platforms...

pea  2 days ago

This is really cool, I enjoyed going through them in this form. Thanks

palmotea  2 days ago

One nit: the message view seems to auto-hyphenate long words on line-breaks to pack in more text, but one of the things that's struck me about Epstein is how utterly incompetent he was with punctuation. Those correctly-inserted hyphens distract from that impression.

marstall  2 days ago

brilliant. feel bad asking for something more - but an inline annotation of who these people are would take it over the top.