A new web app reassembles the Epstein email dump into an eerily familiar interface.New York State Sex Offender Registry/Jmail/Mother Jones illustration
Earlier this month, the House Oversight Committee released a flotilla of Epstein emails—more than 20,000 in total. The revelations created a tidal wave of news. In perhaps the most famous email, Jeffrey Epstein claimed Trump “knew about the girls.” Epstein also called Trump “the dog that hasn’t barked” and alleged that Trump had once spent “hours at my house” with a sex trafficking victim.
A trove of that size would ordinarily be difficult and time-consuming to sort, but this digital dump was especially cumbersome: packaged in oddly titled folders, and tossed with a random assortment of unsearchable detritus and system files.
What if you were able to just… read them like emails?
That’s the simple premise behind “Jmail,” a re-skinning of the documents programmed to look and feel like an everyday Gmail account, with all the design details impeccably parodied and emails displayed in sequential chains, just like your own inbox. It even includes a working search function. Its release this week created it’s own internet storm.
The uncanny execution—a boon to journalists, but so realistic it can leave you disturbed, as if slipping directly into Epstein’s life—was created by two Bay Area internet wizards.
The San Francisco Standard identified the duo as Luke Igel, an AI engineer, and Riley Walz, whom they describe as the city’s “favorite internet rascal.” Before Jmail, he was famous for, among other pranks, creating a website showing the exact locations of the city’s parking police by reverse-engineering the municipal ticket system to reveal, in almost real time, where tickets were being issued (an endeavor that worked for just four hours, according to The New York Times—enough to cement Walz’s internet stardom).
“Many people have made fun of how weird and quirky the whole delivery method was,” Igel told The A.V. Club, describing the Congressional email release. “Someone made an amazing indexed database of those emails using Google Journalist Studio. Problem is that once you click on this beautifully indexed document, it’s really hard to read a PDF. So we just decided to do that, to fix that.”
As The A.V. Club recounts:
To fix it, Igel and Walz used an LLM to convert the plain text in the PDFs back into an email format. Then, once the data was prepped, they used an app called Cursor, which, according to Igel, is an ‘amazing tool that allows you to use AI to code really, really fast,’ to ape Gmail’s aesthetics for a web app.
The two creators selected a list of commonly occurring senders and listed them on the site of their web app: Michael Wolff, Larry Summers, Steve Bannon, and Ken Starr among them. The inclusion of a “Random Page” button sweeps you into a random portion of the chronology.
While we wait for exactly what gets released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which the president signed into law this past week, you can check out Jamil here. And of course, don’t forget Mother Jones’s investigation in which Leland Nally called everyone in Epstein’s notorious “little black book.”
