Last week, the Republican Party decided to release a flood of Jeffrey Epstein’s emails to the public. It seems they believed this massive release would occupy conspiracy theorists and journalists for quite some time, potentially halting the spread of information linking various high-profile individuals to Epstein, a notorious sex trafficker and pedophile. However, the plan didn’t quite work as intended. Instead of sifting through the data, the public discourse quickly pivoted to rumors about Russian President Vladimir Putin having compromising photos of former President Donald Trump. Despite the distraction, these emails, including exchanges like Deepak Chopra expressing a sense of connection with Woody Allen over existential troubles, or Noam Chomsky discussing a Brazilian jazz performance, are now easily accessible. This is thanks to the House Oversight Committee and Jmail, a playful take on Gmail created in just five hours by Luke Igel and Riley Walz, two tech-savvy friends from San Francisco.

The interface of Jmail will look very familiar to Gmail users. Clicking on “Inbox” brings up a chronological list of Epstein’s correspondences up until July 14, 2019, just a month before his death. Among these is his last email, a rather incriminating Quora Digest. Additionally, a “Random Page” button allows users to explore various parts of the archive at random. On the sidebar, users can find direct links to some of Epstein’s more intriguing interactions with figures like Larry Summers, Michael Wolff, Steve Bannon, and Ghislaine Maxwell. It has never been simpler to witness Epstein critiquing Joe Berlinger, the filmmaker behind Metallica: Some Kind Of Monster, as “somewhat of a hack.”

“The emails were already in PDF format,” Igel explained during a phone interview with The A.V. Club. “It was pretty wild. Congress just dumped them into a Google Drive folder. The delivery method was bizarre and quirky, which drew some mockery. Someone even created a sophisticated indexed database of these emails using Google Journalist Studio. The problem was, once you accessed this well-organized index, reading the PDFs was a challenge. So, we decided to fix that.”

To resolve this, Igel and Walz employed an LLM to transform the PDFs’ plain text back into an email format. They then used a tool named Cursor, which Igel describes as “an incredible tool that leverages AI to enable rapid coding,” to mimic Gmail’s design for their web app. Although we at The A.V. Club remain cautious about AI tools, they can be highly effective when used appropriately, and this tool succeeded in making the emails look like they belong in Gmail. They streamlined the database to highlight the most frequent contacts, placing these “top senders” on the sidebar for easy navigation.

Despite a temporary hiccup, the website has been running smoothly since its launch. Igel noted that while AI models typically generate errors, the informal and error-ridden style of Epstein’s emails actually mirrored the kind of errors expected from the LLM. The main challenge was the spacing issues common in converting PDFs. “Honestly, this set of emails was quite suitable for this task,” he remarked. “It’s tough to distinguish what Epstein miswrote from what the AI misinterpreted.” For those concerned about authenticity, each email includes a “view original document” button.

Should more of Epstein’s emails surface, they will also be added to Jmail. “I don’t like these people,” Igel commented, emphasizing that neither he nor Walz supports the individuals involved. “We simply saw a need and addressed it.”

Explore Jmail at Jmail.world.

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Cursor was used to convert text. Instead, Cursor was utilized to develop a web app resembling Gmail. We apologize for the mistake.