Show HN: Jmail – Google Suite for Epstein files

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.

> 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'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.

Well there's only 2500 emails here. They definitely had time to sift through these to make sure friends weren't mentioned.

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

> it's likely even the government couldn't sift through all of them

How could you tell?

They also have “promotions” tab listing all promo content. I wonder is this real or mock data.

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]

"…there's a lot to sift through…"

A job for an LLM…

"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

> 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?

[flagged]

> - 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.

https://www.jmail.world/thread/94b742a9202b9782dcfef7d2aaed1... and this https://www.jmail.world/thread/3a2c95682ec730d0062d6d1c5bcf5.... Why did he order these, for who?

He sure bought a lot of books. I found this that is not a book.

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.

A little while ago Bloomberg published a list of his books. I created two lists on Goodreads containing these books, using Bloomberg as a source.

2007 -> 2017:

https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/237057.Epstein_s_Library...

2018 -> 2019:

https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/237060.Epstein_s_Library...

You can only add 100 books in a Goodreads list so I had to create two. In the lists I linked back to the original Bloomberg article.

Yes, shoutout to our friend Aidan Dunlap for making an entire interface to see those Amazon orders! It's at https://www.jmail.world/jamazon

Jmail is the only place to see those Amazon order emails by the way! Those are from his Yahoo, which Bloomberg announced in September but Drop Site News actually let us release this month. It all came from https://ddosecrets.com/article/epstein-emails (redactions of the full dataset still taking place)

Most of the Amazon orders look mundane, mostly books, what is weird is the quantity. It looks like it is all impulse purchases, and I guess that most of these will end up in the trash once it arrives, if it isn't picked up by someone else first.

I would have thought an quasi-billionaire like Epstein would have a personal concierge do the purchases for him. I certainly would if I was that rich. I would certainly not buy a shower head, I would show my concierge a picture of the shower I want and have him appoint a plumber so that I can have my shower the way I want it when I come back the next day. What's the point of being rich if that's to buy shower heads on Amazon?

Probably goes with this six monitor setup.

https://assets.getkino.com/photos/EFTA00000016-0

good catch! :-)

I’ve seen that room before. I found it during an image search. Either this image you are sharing is not really epsteins or the image I found predated the catch of epsteins misdeeds. Or it’s AI/manipulation all the way down. Not sure what to think anymore

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.

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...

> 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?

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.

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.

Thank you! I tried to optimize scrolling through the photos the most. Avoided any virtualization library, used Cloudflare for image transformations and for caching, etc. The masonry layout and polish you see here is all https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=walz though

Specifically at https://www.jmail.world/photos

Scale of the data behind the service likely contributes. This data is fixed. Therefore it’s easily indexed once into a cache or memory. Your Gmail is ever changing which results in some lost optimization without dramatic cost increase.

In the absence of

[dead]

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.

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

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...

The most incriminating stuff isn't censored, it's been completely destroyed by now

Thank you!

The original site was on Railway and written in Pug! It crashed after Riley's tweet first went viral, then Riley did the heroic work of caching it all with Cloudflare after waking up to the site being down. After millions of unique visitors we racked up about $10 in costs.

This time we switched to Next.js 16 + Vercel, used Cloudflare R2 for asset hosting, and used Neon as the db. R2 has free egress, and Vercel + Next is cheap if cached correctly.

A special someone at Vercel gave us some tips on caching this one earlier today. We started by just using unstable_cache all over the place, and now we're migrating to ISR + full static pre-generation of as many pages as we can via generateStaticParams.

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.

They are being forced to release the files by a new law passed by congress. This is malicious compliance and they’re not actually releasing what they’re supposed to be releasing.

Rich people are hiding their crimes against children with corruption. This law seeks to reveal this corruption. Why is that wrong?

> 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...

Haha I was wondering where this other side of the pond was. This leaves no doubt. Quelle indignité.

For others: it's Sarkozy they are referring to, who was sentenced to 5 years of prison but spent only 20 days in it. He's free until his next trial. For having colluded with terrorists.

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.

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.

Sarkozy is free on appeal, not like he was pardoned or found unaccountable

I think your underlying question comes down to a relationship with the media, accountability and prosperity

By distraction, I think that’s media driven, can be ignored. State actions are transparent enough that you dont need the media to tell you what to pay attention to

In some religious dogma, Prosperity is tied to good deeds, conformity to what collaborative for society. With the expected contrary being suffering.

Seen as “Prosperity Preaching” in Christianity, the concept of karma outside of Abrahamic religions. This is a fiction that has never matched the real world so once that expectation is dropped it will be easier to navigate the world. There is no relationship to financial reward from conformity to a social collaborative behavior, in fact its mostly the opposite, maximum extraction is a core tenant of our system and what is incentivized. If the market is interested in something you can earn from it

And this goes finally into the relationship with accountability. The justice system acts on the rails of its own mechanizations. Its a perversion to want that to include total ostracization, total financial distress for an indeterminate time, I actually dont know the limits of what people want. It seems more so related to how it affects poorer people that way while wealthier and savvier people are exempt from distress, but it shouldnt be the case for poorer people either.

> 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..

Yeah this is insightful. Another dictator went to jail in 1920s for staging a coup and used that time for writing his manifesto and getting sympathy from his followers. Some times (often these days) politics just lives on a plane outside the justice system. And it is really creepy.

The victims themselves want the files to be released. Also, we all know how terrible politicians are, but the whole of public opinion should be made aware of how low the bar is.

Do you know Berlusconi, from the Italian government? He was the Italian version of Donald Trump, and he was involved in a lot of scandals at the time, including being involved with the mafia and, you guessed it, underage girls.

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.

Regarding this error:

> like repeating they decreased drugs price by 600%

The NYT and other media outlets like to point out that this claim is mathematically impossible. However, “cut prices by 600%” is understood perfectly well by most people (but not pedants) to mean “we undid price hikes of 600%.”

I suspect that this phrasing was chosen as a “wedge” to drive home to the MAGA faithful that the news media is biased against them.

I've had the same exact feeling for a while: several people known to be in the files are not the purest people we know and I'm not sure them being there will have any effect whatsoever. Taking Trump, what would really change to his image? All his supporters are already ok with the stuff he did/said and his opponents are already against him.

All his political/business allies won't easily switch as they stay his connections and money, not his clean image.

It just feels like a real-life reality show to keep the news flowing and people just enough bewildered and curious to keep coming back for more. Basically the perfect material for a while.

Especially with all the hyper redacted parts, groups can start literally reading between the lines and make unfounded allegations to create even more clicks.

Yes I‘m also watching with disbelief. Even more so since media attention in the EU about it seems higher than in the US. Although the recent trove I found especially disturbing.

I recently watched a documentary where elites from beginning of the 20th century were also portrayed. Self-portrayed as Philanthropists. Moral bankruptcy became obvious, although in other manifestations such as shooting members of worker unions. And the US government did something in form of the New Deal, splitting monopolies and other policies.

In an optimistic scenario I’d expect something similar. New ways to hold elites accountable and keeping extreme differences in wealth in check.

Decades of unresolved corruption scandals , finally a chance to confirm what we suspected about sleazy and deplorable elites . Slim chances, but what else do we have

Thanks for writing this. I also feel disturbing such morbid outlook to someone’s private digital life.

The victims themselves were asking for the files to be fully released so that their abusers are held accountable. This was a big "fuck you" to the victims when everything of significance was [REDACTED]

Foreign governments running honeytrap operations on powerful perverts like bill clinton is common knowledge amongst anyone interested in knowing about such things, but some people think it is a super big secret that needs to be revealed to the masses. Thomas Massie for instance. I don’t think it’s antisemitism but I’m pretty sure it’s not because of a sudden concern for teenage prostitution, which is a big ongoing problem that could be addressed by legislators crafting policy if they weren’t so busy slinging mud at each other looking for Epstein photos with their political opponents.

gaussian splats alone are >500GBs lol

(lot of bad quality ones though)

No way. Next level.

what photo captions?

are you talking about OpenGraph metadata or something else that we can fix?

In general, his emails read like something I've observed people doing IRL; they coax smart people into talking by saying ambiguous, clever sounding things (which are actually nonsense). The actually intelligent person will give them the benefit of doubt by association with their connections, thinking they must be intelligent to have such friends, and assume they misheard or something. Quite surprising how often nonsense like that passes muster. From the bits I've skimmed so far, he looks like a very successful hanger on that leveraged each connection into other ones.

I feel like this is in code, and we need to decipher it.

This reads like notes taken on a presentation.

ditto for email. Usually I open one email on the phone and slide left-right or right-left to navigate between adjacent emails.

He has tshirts and hats that say "mossad" on them

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"

Yes we'd love to. Letting the dust settle first

lol

Wild guess: some kind of elite status signaling. “no time for punctuation im so busy very important u understand”

I believe this is from people using some speech-to-text mechanism who don't know or don't care that you can literally spell out punctuation.

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

Instead of attachment, click on the second tab on top of the screen.

weird — there’s thousands

we should bugfix

which url did you do that?

can you help repro?

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

Jemini has access to the data to help make sense of it.

We are working on better embeddings including image embeddings.

Good heroance.

You made me imagine an alternate universe where there is a Jeffrey programming language and the man is named Java Epstein.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> What I am saying is that women make bad choices [...] and later regret it

Yes, especially when those women are also children. One of the many reasons it's illegal to have sex with them and especially illegal to rent their bodies to your friends.

Transporting a minor for sex is illegal, regardless of whether they are considered of age in the jurisdiction they're being taken to.

But besides that, you're saying he ran a blackmail operation, which seems likely. If the girls he pimped out were of legal age, that's a lot less leverage to blackmail his targets with, isn't it?

So your claim is that someone is not a victim unless they are physically restrained or imprisoned? Can you give some examples of clear, definitive "legitimate victims" for contrast? Or are you insinuating that victim hood cannot be claimed unless they both come from the same income strata? Because otherwise the victims incentive to make money outweighs the possibility that the claim is true, that a wealthy person could in fact be a rapist?

[flagged]

[flagged]

Of course the perpetrators of child abuse would be adjacent to child abuse material. That's why the material needs to be indexed, to make sense of it and round up the rest of the perpetrators.

Police and prosecutors have such a great time cataloguing criminals' activities--let's imply that they love crime.

Way to miss the point entirely.

Although in principle I agree with the sentiment, sometimes for difficult illnesses we need to accept the side effects of the cure.

just link dupe, but not content dupe

read rest of the thread with more context on why