Uploading to TAXSIM by Email

As of mid 2005 some users are having difficulty uploading even medium sized files. We believe this is a browser problem, and have enabled an email upload procedure as a workaround.

At the moment options can't be set for email submissions, but default to marginal tax rates calculated with respect to wages, and no addititional detail in calculations. We can add other possibilities if you write or call.

The message should be sent to taxsim-wage@nber.org. The subject line and all other header lines are ignored by TAXSIM.

The email message should include the dataset, just as documented on the TAXSIM submission page as the body of the message, preceeded by a blank line, and with no signature. If you forget the initial blank line you will get no response, and no calculations will be performed. If you leave in the signature, you will get a spurious error message returned by email.

The results may be retrieved from the directory https://www.nber.org/taxsim/results a few minutes after they are received here. The filename will be a 4 or 5 digit random number - the file extension will be ".out" but you won't receive any indication of which of these files is yours if there are more than one. Our expectation is that there will be sufficiently few users that this ambiguity will not lead to confusion. Results should remain available for a day or two. Other temporary files in that directory have longer names and are from web uploads.

Please call if you have any questions or problems.

One likely problem is that you will get your message to us returned for exceeding the maximum message size. Look at closely at that message - it is from your mail transfer agent, not ours. We don't impose a maximum message size. It is possible that some mail agents will mangle the message - as we get more experience we will post it here. Other things to remember - don't compress the file or attach it to the message. The file must be in the body.

Daniel Feenberg
feenberg isat nber dotte org

617-588-0343