I still regularly think about the 2018 text adventure game You Are Jeff Bezos, which confronts you with how colossal an amount of money Bezos's $156 billion net worth really was, and how much good it could do if it wasn't hoarded by an individual. (Bezos is now worth more than $200 billion). It's a great example of the sort of clever data-based trinket that grabs the internet's attention every so often, like Asteroid Launcher, Subway Builder, or today's Jmail, which lets you browse more than 2,000 of Jeffrey Epstein's emails in a fake Gmail inbox.
Fun, right?
Okay, maybe not as fun as pretending to spend Jeff Bezos' money, or idly messing around with what kind of crater an asteroid would leave if it landed directly on your house and offered you the sweet release of obliteration. But Jmail does allow you to type "Bezos" into the familiar Gmail search bar and discover an email exchange listing his name alongside Marc Andreesen, Sergey Brin, Bill Gates and Peter Thiel for a potential seminar about "MONEY" circa 2012. Cool!!
Launched this morning, the email repository is the creation of a couple San Francisco techies with a knack for viral, data-driven browser projects. Co-creator Riley Walz previously launched a tool to track San Francisco's parking cops (the city quickly blocked the data flow he was using), and a very sweet randomizer for every YouTube video uploaded with a generic title like IMG_0001. I have a feeling Jmail is going to get a lot more attention.
The underlying data informing the tool is a trove of documents released by the US House Oversight Committee, which are laborious to search through in PDF form. Of course Walz and co-creator Luke Igel used AI to put it together, invoking Google Gemini to perform OCR (optical character recognition) on the emails to rip out the raw text and present it in the clean, faux-email interface.
The use of an LLM made me wary that some of the emails could be "hallucinated," but each one is actually backed by a real scan. You can click "View original document" in the Jmail interface to see the underlying PDF, and then search its name in the House Oversight database I linked above to confirm it's legit.
This is now, by far, the easiest way to read Epstein's emails, work I'd previously been relying on the journalists at Defector for. As with other viral-friendly browser projects (like everything made by Neal Agarwal), I'm finding it hard to stop clicking around in Jmail. Every email offers some sort of amusement or horror, like Epstein emailing himself "Fwd: radical breakthrough" with definitely-not-stoned thoughts like "beards and long hair, are meant to catch and hold smells. ?"
Jmail includes's Gmail's ability to star messages, except it's crowdsourced instead of personal. Here are some of the messages that the internet has bumped to the top of the list, as of this writing:
- 228 stars: Mark L. Epstein: Ask [Steve Bannon] if Putin has the photos of Trump blowing Bubba?
- 88 stars: Quora Digest: Is Denmark going bankrupt?
- 48 stars: Re: Fw: Netflix/Jeffrey Epstein: Jeffrey....how much do you know about this?
- 25 stars: Gmax: Re: 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
