Original Summary

Responses to public-records (FOIA, or California PRA) requests often arrive as PST or mbox files, which &#x27;normal&#x27; people don&#x27;t know how to open. If they&#x27;re lucky they can import them into Apple mail or the Outlook desktop client.<p>But it&#x27;s hard to share with others, and impossible to link to a specific thread or a specific spot in a specific thread.<p>Jmail (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jmail.world" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jmail.world</a>), the Gmail-style viewer for the Epstein emails, was heavily upvoted on HN, because it felt so easy to use. I had hoped the team would open source the code, but I don&#x27;t think they did.<p>My first attempt at my own version (made for a specific pst file I received) was usable, but had some limitations. Recently, I threw Claude Opus 5.5 (xhigh) at the problem.<p>This is the result.<p>The mbv build command turns a mailbox (PST, mbox or Maildir) into:<p>- a set of parquet files<p>- a word index<p>- embeddings.<p>You upload those to any static host that support HTTP range requests (e.g. Cloudflare R2) and deploy one front-end viewer (e.g. Vercel) for any number of mailboxes. There&#x27;s no backend computation. The browser queries the Parquet files with DuckDB-WASM over HTTP range requests.<p>It rebuilds conversations (including from Outlook&#x27;s Thread-Index), keeps folders as labels, supports Gmail&#x27;s search operators (from:, has:attachment, before:, OR, &quot;phrases&quot;), searches text inside PDF and Office attachments, and adds semantic search with a small embedding model that runs in the browser.<p>Every view has its own URL, so you can deep link to a search and a conversation. This link searches a school district mailbox for &quot;straight white male&quot; and opens the matching thread with the hits highlighted:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mail.ocaho.com&#x2F;youcubed-2026-03#search&#x2F;Straight%20white%20male&#x2F;c7d7869c3947fc41" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mail.ocaho.com&#x2F;youcubed-2026-03#search&#x2F;Straight%20wh...</a><p>Demo with a fictional mailbox: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mail.ocaho.com&#x2F;demo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mail.ocaho.com&#x2F;demo</a><p>Code (MIT): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rahimnathwani&#x2F;mailbox-viewer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rahimnathwani&#x2F;mailbox-viewer</a>


  • 情报分类:技术学习与提效
  • 分类依据:内容涉及技术、AI、软件工具或工程实践
  • 信息来源:Hacker News 新项目
  • 发布时间:2026/10/11 06:31:18