A few weeks ago, Luke Igel had an idea. Like many Americans, Igel, a 26-year-old software engineer and tech CEO based in San Francisco, had been looking through the latest dump of Jeffrey Epstein’s emails and discussing them with his friends. But he was finding the data dump both hard to read and hard to contextualize. What these emails really represented, Igel thought, was a guy who sits around on his ipad or Blackberry all day emailing everyone he knows.
“My friend was talking about all this stuff he was finding,” says Igel. “And I found it impressive he’d been able to infer that from these very hard to read PDFs. I found that they were hard to read as emails.”
To solve the problem, Igel, who runs an AI video assistant company, called up his old friend, Riley Walz, a fellow Zoomer tech savant who’s made a name in the past few years for his viral data stunts (in September, Walz scraped government data to create a real-time “Find My Friends”-like interface showing the location of every cop giving out parking tickets in San Francisco). “Every time I see a high effort, shockingly good site or stunt, I scroll down and it’s my friend Riley,” says Igel,
In a matter of five hours, Walz and Igel transformed all the raw data provided by the latest Epstein dump — 20,000 emails, give or take — into Jmail, a hyper-realistic Gmail-like interface that lays out what Epstein’s actual email inbox might look like. The website, which went live on Friday, went viral over the weekend, giving users an insight into the daily life of one of the world’s most discussed criminals. The surreal result is a representation of a chronological inbox that has Quora and Flipboard email blasts interspersed with exchanges with former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and winking emails to Steve Bannon. (“If you form a church you may be able to tell mueller you have a confession privelege [sic],” he wrote in 2018.) A loaded 2011 email to Ghislaine Maxwell — “i want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is Trump” — sits between links to CNBC articles. As one early online responder to the data stunt wrote, “Oh man, the banality of evil in there.”
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“The Epstein case has always felt very Lovecraftian, very True Detective, where it’s driven all the best people insane because there’s just too much information and it feels like puncturing holes in reality every single time news comes out,” says Igel. “Even with this recent set of data, it doesn’t feel like the full story is being revealed. If anything, it feels like a series of red herrings and a series of shockingly human moments.”
Speaking with Rolling Stone the day Jmail went live, Igel is excited about his new project. While on the phone, he pauses for a moment when he thinks the site has momentarily crashed, then breathes a sigh of relief when he realizes it hasn’t. He says that recent AI tools have made it so that a project that might have taken five full days just a few years ago now takes five hours. “All these ways people were promised how great software could be a few decades ago, it really does feel like it’s coming true now,” says Igel. “It’s so quick and cheap and easy to make software.”
And he wants to stress that his Gmail recreation is in fact a parody and not a clone. “I’m pretty sure parodies are protected,” he says. Mostly, it was a challenge that he wanted to tackle to make the emails more navigable for himself and the general public. “The company that I run, we index large amounts of video, so this is just a very fun problem that I’ve always enjoyed building tools for.”
Mostly, Igel wants to emphasize that more people can and should do projects like this. “It was not that hard to build,” he says. “There were two steps: One was extracting these very messy data from those PDFs, putting them back into the data form they came from, which was email, and then building a very faithful Gmail parody.” They started the project at 9 p.m. last Wednesday, were finished by 1 a.m., then spent Thursday fixing a few bugs before going live Friday.
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Walz and Igel originally did a deep dive in how to recreate the exact feel and look of a Gmail inbox from the time appropriate era (the mid-late 2010’s), but they ultimately decided it was a distraction that would take away from the point of their project: to make these Epstein emails feel as real and as quotidian as possible. “We found that it actually hit a lot harder for people if we just did 2025 Gmail,” Igel says.
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Assuming Jmail stays up, Igel says the project may very well not be over. If and when more Epstein emails are released, Jmail may change as needed.
“We’ll be keeping an eye on it,” Igel says.
