Recommendations of the Editorial team
A few weeks earlier, Luke Hedgehog had an idea. Like many Americans, Igel, a 26-year-old software engineer and tech CEO from San Francisco, had reviewed the latest releases of Jeffrey Epstein’s emails and talked about them with his friends. But he found the data release difficult to read and difficult to contextualize. What those emails really represented, Hedgehog thought, be a guy who sits on his iPad or Blackberry all day and texts everyone he knows.
“My friend talked about all the things he found,” Igel says. “And I thought it was impressive that he was able to get that out of these hard-to-read PDFs. I thought 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, another tech savant of the Zoomer generation who has made a name for himself in recent years with viral data projects (in September, Walz had tapped government data to create a kind of real-time “Find My Friends” interface that shows the location of every police officer handing out traffic tickets in San Francisco). “Every time I see an elaborate, shockingly good page or promotion, I scroll down and it’s my friend Riley,” Igel says.
A technical problem becomes an idea
Within five hours, Walz and Igel transformed all of the raw data from Epstein’s most recent release — some 20,000 emails — into Jmail, a hyper-realistic Gmail-like interface that shows what Epstein’s actual email inbox might have looked like. The website went live on Friday and went viral over the weekend, giving users a glimpse into the daily life of one of the world’s most talked-about criminals.
The surreal result is a depiction of a chronological inbox where Quora and Flipboard newsletters sit between email exchanges with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and winking messages to Steve Bannon. (“If you start a church, maybe you can tell Mueller you have confessional privilege,” he wrote in 2018.) An explosive 2011 email to Ghislaine Maxwell — “I want you to understand that that dog that didn’t bark is Trump” — sits among links to CNBC articles. As one early online commenter on the Data Project wrote: “Oh man, the banality of evil in there.”
“The Epstein case always felt very Lovecraftian, very True Detective, where it drives all the best people crazy because it’s just too much information and it feels like a hole is being poked in reality every time news comes out,” Igel says. “Even with this new data collection, it doesn’t feel like the whole story is being revealed. If anything, it feels like a series of red herrings and shockingly human moments.”
The banality of evil in the inbox
Speaking to ROLLING STONE on the day of the Jmail launch, Igel is excited about his new project. During the call, he pauses for a moment, thinking the site has crashed, before realizing with relief that it hasn’t. He says new AI tools make projects that would have taken five full days a few years ago now possible in five hours. “All the things we were promised decades ago about how great software could be — now it really feels like it’s coming true,” says Igel. “It’s so quick and cheap and easy to build software.”
And he wants to emphasize that his Gmail recreation is actually a parody and not a clone. “I’m pretty sure parodies are protected,” he says. Above all, it was a challenge that he wanted to solve in order to make the emails more readable for himself and the public. “The company I run indexes large amounts of video, so this is just a really fun problem that I’ve always enjoyed building tools for.”
Above all, Igel would like to emphasize that more people could and should do projects like this. “It wasn’t that hard to build,” he says. “There were two steps: first, extracting this very messy data from the PDFs and putting it back into the data form it came from — which was email — and then building a very detailed Gmail spoof.” They started the project on Wednesday at 9 p.m., finished at 1 a.m., and spent Thursday fixing a few bugs before going live on Friday.
A project that should actually take five days
Walz and Igel had originally done deep research into how to recreate the exact look and feel of a Gmail inbox of the era (mid-to-late 2010s), but they ultimately decided that this would be distracting and take away from the core of their project: making these Epstein emails seem as real and everyday as possible. “We found that if we just used Gmail 2025, it had a much stronger impact on people,” Igel says.
If Jmail stays online, Igel says, the project may be far from over. If more Epstein emails are released, Jmail will change accordingly.
“We’ll keep an eye on it,” says Igel.