I'm impressed. You guys cloned a whole suite of products in a short period of time that cost millions of dollars. Even the little bits of humor look costly.
On the other hand, it's way more information than I expected. I can see why someone would hesitate to release them - there's a lot to sift through and it's likely even the government couldn't sift through all of them to make sure their friends weren't mentioned somewhere.
> You guys cloned a whole suite of products in a short period of time that cost millions of dollars.
At the risk of stating the obvious, the functionality isn't actually cloned, only the UI. The actual code powering Gmail probably dates back to the late 80s or early 90s and has had several hundred thousands of hours of work put into it. This is just a webpage that looks kind of similar.
I point this out only because I've seen people saying that software businesses don't have moats anymore because of this, which is taking away a completely false lesson.
Out of curiosity, would you explain what you mean by that? Google was founded in 1998 and writing a mail client isn't terribly complicated. Did they buy some code for Gmail from an older company? Is Gmail older than Google?
A full featured mailed client is insanely complicated. If you think mail client is just smtp, you probably think word is just text with some styling and excel is just some cells and functions.
I’m sure, buried somewhere deep in Google systems, are vestiges of mail server code originally written in the 80s. But when people use the name Gmail, they are generally referring to the client facing web app, which does not have any such code.
In 10 days now, with Claude Code Web, I now have feature parity+++ with several (over)paid bussiness administration suites in a niche in my country. I am planning to make it free and not decided yet whether to open source it.
I think we're going to see a lot of free software coming out, especially the more CRUD like software. Single developers can compete with software with a large codebase and legacy. Of course in case of bussiness administration you want knowledgeable support and be sure the data is safe. That's worth a lot. But I have another business model in mind where I can also offer state of the art support, maintenance and data security.
My software is basically SaaS with a companion Flutter app. Security and privacy are my number one priority and by using the fabulous SKILLS.MD my privacy compliance skill helps a lot and my security skill seems to be on par with other tools I tried to verify it with and it continues to learn.
Advantage of Claude Code,it will fix it immediately when P1/CRITICAL and for the rest I only have to type: yes please ;-)
In one day, I created an Android app in Kotlin (never wrote a single line in Kotlin) that is completely tailored to my son,he's a toddler of almost 3.
It has a start screen with games that relate to events in his life we experienced together like feeding the dog (throw bones to a dog that looks enough like ours so he understands), a whack-a-mole game where gnomes appear on red with white-dot mushrooms (he discovered them in a nearby forest) and of course things like firefighting, police,excavator. Because it's so easy I've now left him with 50 mini games (yes, feature creep like behavior). Some are educational (learning colors, counting but toddler difficulty) or fun to do, like magic paint that shows colored particles as a trail following his finger or adding color to random shapes.
TTS tell him what to do, encourages him, saying his name, telling him he did well when he completes a game.He gets random videos of family members cheering when he reaches a set score.
Cheering videos are also AI made. Did that with the photo to video feature of Grok. I had 15 mini-games on day one, now 50 mini-games after a week. But entire time spent with supervising Claude is about 4 hours.
And, I should not forget to mention, all from the browser of my mobile phone and very often in bed with Claude working while I sleep (previously also providing new prompts at night, when Claude would reset its limits).
But I enjoy it so much and possibly I can make it a bussiness (although I worry someone else can relatively easy get feature parity with me)that I decided to get the Max 20x plan, and prompting 4 projects with each 2 to 3 running 'conversations' , never hit the limit anymore.
Thanks! And it's a lot of info, yeah. ~90% of new data in yesterday's drop was photographs, which they redacted for us.
The House Oversight Committee's giant drop in November had tons of data we still didn't take advantage of even after doing the original Jmail, like flight logs.
For the Yahoo release, which is still ongoing, the folks at Drop Site News (see https://www.jmail.world/about) are handling the manual redaction which has been very time consuming, even with tons of AI to help in the background.
It's because Riley is a fkn spook, wouldn't be surprised if they had access weeks in advanced. I also wouldn't trust Riley to be an honest actor what so ever.
You added icons and functionality to go to the beginning or end of search/inbox - Something that gmail just has never budged on having and always annoyed me! One of the first things I noticed. I must not be alone on this lol
I participated on this project, but I'm not the main contributor. In fact, I'm working on running an ML model to get some nice gaussian splat visualizations of some of the relevant images based on the recent release by Apple's model: SHARP. It allows doing inference of a PLY point-cloud based on a single JPG image.
Hopefully I can merge some UI for it soon, but I'm away from my main computer right now.
EDIT: I'm going to text my friend Luke to comment and answer any questions about the project.
EDIT2: I am also happy to expand on the technical details of the project once I get a stable internet connection.
I'm one of the co-creators of Jmail alongside Riley Walz. We launched a Gmail-like view of Epstein's inbox last month. It got millions of page views, tons of really amazing requests to collaborate on making more related data accessible, and even new Yahoo emails that no one else has allowed the public to see.
Yesterday's DOJ drop resulted in this very spontaneous rag-tag team of friends coming to my place in SF and each making their own app in the "Jmail" Suite. Riley and I are pretty shocked by how versatile this parody style is for visualizing Epstein's 20 year digital footprint.
It's been a ton of fun and we're working hard to polish each view here.
Of course the perpetrators of child abuse would be adjacent to child abuse material. That's why the material needs to be indexed, to make sense of it and round up the rest of the perpetrators.
How complete is the material? I've seen "experts" in Swedish news paper DN claim so much is censored it looks like a cover up. Has that been your impression too?
1. DOJ (The White House's docs that they were required by law to drop yesterday plus many court documents, videos, and other docs from many news cycles this year)
2. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT (the House Oversight Committee's releases. giant November drop that led to the original Jmail, then some photo drops this month)
3. Yahoo emails (originally sourced by DDoSecrets, then provided to us, redacted and verified by Drop Site News)
There is so much material in HOUSE_OVERSIGHT that never appears in DOJ, and vice versa. And then the Yahoo drop reveals even more new material. It feels like three odd slices of a giant dataset that keeps getting released.
re: people's complaints about yesterday's release having way too many redactions, I have no idea how much they over-redacted. I hear that they will release even more quite soon though.
Ah I was going to ask about the Yahoo emails.. are those distinct from the cloned Gmail messages or are they in the same inbox on your site?
Has anyone written a parser for the text messages? A messages-like UI to be able to read through all the texts would be super interesting too. The format DOJ released them in is impossible to follow.
Yes, it has been redacted far in excess of what the law allows, and the material is a tiny fraction of what the administration was required by law to release by this date
Everytime I watch these private jets and helicopters I wonder why flying economy class has to be so miserable in terms of horizontal, vertical, and leg space.
I saw, but the project has changed since then. There's now Google Photos, improvements to Drive, Jemini (LLM that can assist when understanding the files), and JFlights for flight tracking.
I sent an email to the hn email with more details!
On the other hand, it's way more information than I expected. I can see why someone would hesitate to release them - there's a lot to sift through and it's likely even the government couldn't sift through all of them to make sure their friends weren't mentioned somewhere.
At the risk of stating the obvious, the functionality isn't actually cloned, only the UI. The actual code powering Gmail probably dates back to the late 80s or early 90s and has had several hundred thousands of hours of work put into it. This is just a webpage that looks kind of similar.
I point this out only because I've seen people saying that software businesses don't have moats anymore because of this, which is taking away a completely false lesson.
I think we're going to see a lot of free software coming out, especially the more CRUD like software. Single developers can compete with software with a large codebase and legacy. Of course in case of bussiness administration you want knowledgeable support and be sure the data is safe. That's worth a lot. But I have another business model in mind where I can also offer state of the art support, maintenance and data security.
My software is basically SaaS with a companion Flutter app. Security and privacy are my number one priority and by using the fabulous SKILLS.MD my privacy compliance skill helps a lot and my security skill seems to be on par with other tools I tried to verify it with and it continues to learn.
Advantage of Claude Code,it will fix it immediately when P1/CRITICAL and for the rest I only have to type: yes please ;-)
In one day, I created an Android app in Kotlin (never wrote a single line in Kotlin) that is completely tailored to my son,he's a toddler of almost 3.
It has a start screen with games that relate to events in his life we experienced together like feeding the dog (throw bones to a dog that looks enough like ours so he understands), a whack-a-mole game where gnomes appear on red with white-dot mushrooms (he discovered them in a nearby forest) and of course things like firefighting, police,excavator. Because it's so easy I've now left him with 50 mini games (yes, feature creep like behavior). Some are educational (learning colors, counting but toddler difficulty) or fun to do, like magic paint that shows colored particles as a trail following his finger or adding color to random shapes.
TTS tell him what to do, encourages him, saying his name, telling him he did well when he completes a game.He gets random videos of family members cheering when he reaches a set score.
Cheering videos are also AI made. Did that with the photo to video feature of Grok. I had 15 mini-games on day one, now 50 mini-games after a week. But entire time spent with supervising Claude is about 4 hours.
And, I should not forget to mention, all from the browser of my mobile phone and very often in bed with Claude working while I sleep (previously also providing new prompts at night, when Claude would reset its limits).
But I enjoy it so much and possibly I can make it a bussiness (although I worry someone else can relatively easy get feature parity with me)that I decided to get the Max 20x plan, and prompting 4 projects with each 2 to 3 running 'conversations' , never hit the limit anymore.
Can you expand on this please? Really cool btw.
The House Oversight Committee's giant drop in November had tons of data we still didn't take advantage of even after doing the original Jmail, like flight logs.
For the Yahoo release, which is still ongoing, the folks at Drop Site News (see https://www.jmail.world/about) are handling the manual redaction which has been very time consuming, even with tons of AI to help in the background.
For now we’re focusing on fixing the bugs because we’re already seeing an insane wave of traffic so most of us are focused on keeping the site alive.
Images removed from Epstein files less than a day after being posted - https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-12-21/images-removed-from-e...
promises all the sleuthing excitement of chasing the significance of Donald in a Drawer.
Hopefully I can merge some UI for it soon, but I'm away from my main computer right now.
EDIT: I'm going to text my friend Luke to comment and answer any questions about the project.
EDIT2: I am also happy to expand on the technical details of the project once I get a stable internet connection.
I'm one of the co-creators of Jmail alongside Riley Walz. We launched a Gmail-like view of Epstein's inbox last month. It got millions of page views, tons of really amazing requests to collaborate on making more related data accessible, and even new Yahoo emails that no one else has allowed the public to see.
Yesterday's DOJ drop resulted in this very spontaneous rag-tag team of friends coming to my place in SF and each making their own app in the "Jmail" Suite. Riley and I are pretty shocked by how versatile this parody style is for visualizing Epstein's 20 year digital footprint.
It's been a ton of fun and we're working hard to polish each view here.
i can say that 90% of the work was in making sense of the data, indexing, processing, etc
1. DOJ (The White House's docs that they were required by law to drop yesterday plus many court documents, videos, and other docs from many news cycles this year)
2. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT (the House Oversight Committee's releases. giant November drop that led to the original Jmail, then some photo drops this month)
3. Yahoo emails (originally sourced by DDoSecrets, then provided to us, redacted and verified by Drop Site News)
There is so much material in HOUSE_OVERSIGHT that never appears in DOJ, and vice versa. And then the Yahoo drop reveals even more new material. It feels like three odd slices of a giant dataset that keeps getting released.
re: people's complaints about yesterday's release having way too many redactions, I have no idea how much they over-redacted. I hear that they will release even more quite soon though.
Do you have a page about each dataset you're sourcing and the background on them like your provide here?
The "EFTA00000468" saga has me distrusting the authenticity of most of these datasets.
Has anyone written a parser for the text messages? A messages-like UI to be able to read through all the texts would be super interesting too. The format DOJ released them in is impossible to follow.
One suggestion: please add previous/next navigation on the images, so that one doesnt have to open an image, close, open again.
Nice using self-emails as a knowledge base.
- JPhotos: https://www.jmail.world/photos
- JDrive: https://www.jmail.world/drive
- JAmazon: https://www.jmail.world/jamazon
I would have put the “release” part in scare quotes as anything important has been redacted.
https://hnrankings.info/46339600/
https://hnrankings.info/46004118/
I sent an email to the hn email with more details!
Also since that post we worked with Drop Site News + DDoSecrets to post new Yahoo emails that no one has let the public see yet.
read rest of the thread with more context on why