When the House Committee on Oversight and Government released 20,000 documents from the estate of Jeffrey Epstein, two California tech guys got to work. Riley Walz and Luke Igel launched a project known as Jmail. They created a virtual replica of Epstein's inbox for anyone to look through, containing thousands of emails sent between the paedophile financier and high-profile people including Ghislaine Maxwell, political strategist Steve Bannon, journalist Michael Wolff, and former US treasury secretary Larry Summers – and there are many references to Donald Trump. (Picture: Joe Schildhorn/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)
Thanks to Walz and Igel, who have a track record of creating fun yet functional web tools, you can browse all those emails like you would in your own Gmail account. The site looks a lot like a normal Gmail inbox, other than an alternative logo, which is complete with a summer hat perched on top. It allows you to go through thousands of emails that have been formatted to look like how Gmails would in your computer or phone. (Picture: Jmail)
The pair used Google Geminis’ optical character recognition abilities to extract text and arrange it in an imitation of Gmail. However, the result is not a product of AI. It results in a more accessible way to look through the documents, and allows users flag emails they view as important and then rank them based on how many people do so. (Picture: Jmail)
Speaking to WIRED, Igel said: ‘The emails were just so hard to read. It felt like so much of the shock would've come if you saw actual screenshots of the actual inbox, but what you were seeing was these really low quality, poorly scanned PDFs. You have to do a few steps of imagination to remind yourself that this is indeed a real email.’ (Picture: Kypros/Getty Images)
Igel said that going through the emails, you can begin to see when Epstein changed his communication style. He said that there’s an increase in typos and sporadic formatting when Epstein switched from a desktop keyboard to a touchscreen device in the early 2010s. He said: ‘You can see him getting worse at typing as the years go by, as he clearly switches to an iPad. You can see all this kind of boomer behavior which is very familiar behavior of less tech-savvy people.’ (Picture: Jmail)
The end result is a simple and accessible way for anyone to read his emails, without needing to peruse through thousands of documents. Igel told WIRED: ‘This only took us a few hours. I think other people should do similar things where you think that just a little bit of new software can make a lot of these things that are happening in the world easier to understand. You should just do it.’ (Picture: Davidoff Studios/Getty Images)
If you don’t want to spend hours on the page, however, there are also starred messages crowdsourced by users, highlighting the strangest parts so you don’t have to dig for them yourself. Epstein died in 2019, which the New York medical examiner ruled as a suicide by hanging in a Manhattan jail cell at the age of 66. At the time, Epstein pleaded not guilty to sex trafficking and conspiracy charges and was being held without bail. (Picture: Stephanie Keith/Getty Images)
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