Show HN: Jmail – Google Suite for Epstein files
jmail.world1536 points by lukeigel 4 days ago
1536 points by lukeigel 4 days ago
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!
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. Hey, I’d be interested in your thoughts on this, or the key ideas/research results you relied on: 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. 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! >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". Everyone is distracted by the redaction policy discussion. The concern is that it is from a charity event that is seemingly unrelated to Epstein. 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. It is perfectly possible, even common, to frame the guilty. It’s easier than finding real evidence.
muzani - 4 days ago
lukeigel - 4 days ago
dvrp - 4 days ago
nsomaru - 4 days ago
lukeigel - 3 days ago
defrost - 4 days ago
wahnfrieden - 4 days ago
bryanrasmussen - 4 days ago
Arn_Thor - 4 days ago
bryanrasmussen - 4 days ago
gruez - 3 days ago
wahnfrieden - 2 days ago
dontlaugh - 4 days ago
brookst - 3 days ago