Rarely are emails captivating. Jeffrey Epstein’s inbox is the exception. For weeks, Americans have been poring through the correspondence of the convicted sex offender, released by the House Oversight Committee, unearthing deranged friendships, quid pro quos, and an unsettling look into the financier’s mind and social network.
These are the emails that launched a thousand conspiracy theories and led to job losses and congressional investigations. Yet searching through them has not been easy, even for the most dedicated internet sleuths. The files are laggy and hard to parse.
Enter Luke Igel, a Russian Hill AI engineer, and San Francisco’s favorite internet rascal, Riley Walz.
Igel teamed up with Walz to transform the tedium of sifting through Epstein’s inbox into something closer to a familiar, everyday agony: checking your own email. They created a tool called Jmail, which they announced on Friday morning with a tweet (opens in new tab). JMail presents the thousands of emails in a clean, Gmail-like interface — though, for legal reasons, the pair stress that it is a parody of the Alphabet-owned email service, not a clone.
On Jmail.World (opens in new tab), you can browse Epstein’s inbox like it’s your own. The left sidebar highlights recurring correspondents: his partner and co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell; former Harvard president Larry Summers; the eminent linguist Noam Chomsky; and even Al Seckel, an eccentric collector who worked with Epstein in 2011 to scrub his Wikipedia page.
A search bar lets you dig deeper. Type “island,” and you’ll get 168 results. Search “Trump,” and the number jumps to 1,000.
“I think the craziest, most meta [part] is that you’re reading his private emails of him trying to clean up his own reputation,” Igel said.
Walz, whom The New York Times dubbed San Francisco’s “Tech Jester (opens in new tab),” has built a reputation pulling Robin Hood-style stunts that blend technical skill with mischievous civic commentary. His pranks have ranged from DDoS-ing Waymo to creating a fake politician (opens in new tab) who managed to get verified on Twitter. But it was his clone of “Find My Friends,” designed to track parking-enforcement officers in San Francisco, that convinced Igel he wanted to collaborate.
Igel, cofounder of Kino AI, helps Hollywood studios and other organizations search and index massive amounts of video using artificial intelligence. He had long admired Walz’s work. After struggling to parse Epstein’s messy, poorly formatted emails himself, he pitched Walz on building a better way.
“At first he said the data was too messy,” Igel said. “Then he texts me later that night, and he’s like, ‘I got nerd-sniped (opens in new tab) by you. Maybe we should do this.’”
The pair met the next day at 9 p.m. and spent five hours shoulder-to-shoulder in Cursor, grinding out the first version of Jmail. The site has had more than 350,000 visitors since launching Friday morning, and Walz’s tweet has had nearly 4 million views as of Friday evening.
The project hit close to home for Igel, who vividly remembers when the Epstein story erupted in 2019.
“I was a freshman in college when the story broke,” he said. “I went to school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and it felt like all the fancy people you hear about as a freshman — turns out a ton of them were friends with this guy.”
A clearer window into Epstein’s world was buried in the government’s clunky PDFs. Thanks to Igel and Walz, it now loads as quickly — and uneasily — as your own inbox.