Question for Nathan re Curtis Brown firewall

[triakis66]

Nathan-

Pardon this silly, longwinded question from a totally nervous newbie, but given your proximity to Curtis Brown I thought you'd be the best public resource to consult.

Yesterday I sent out my first batch of queries ever. I'd originally intended to query you about my novel, a thriller, but when you announced your departure, I looked through the remaining Curtis Brown agents for someone else to whom the project might appeal. Based, among other things, on her Publishers Marketplace page (saying "particularly interested in...thrillers"), Margaret Walters seemed to be the best candidate. Although her Curtis Brown page didn't mention an email address the way yours did, the Publishers Marketplace page indicated "Queries can also be emailed to mawalters@cbltd.com." After diligently working up my query, pasting my first chapter in so there were no attachments, I squeezed my eyes shut, held my nose, and pressed "Send."

Several minutes later, I got a bounceback from Curtis Brown's firewall, saying "Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently" because "it was rejected by the recipient domain....The error that the other server returned was: 550 550 5.7.1 reject: Spam value exceeded. (state 18)."

Panicked, I checked all the websites again. This time I noticed her email address on Publishers Marketplace was a different format than yours. I noticed the lack of reference to email queries on her Curtis Brown page. Oh no, I thought, I totally goofed--she must not want email queries at all, the Publishers Marketplace site must have everything wrong, etc, etc, etc.

After cursing myself for an hour and eventually getting my heart rate back to normal, I returned to Curtis Brown's site. I found another agent that might fit, one who *does* expressly solicit email queries, and at an email akin to the one you had posted. Perfect, I thought, I'll just modify my query and resend.

Just did so and got another bounceback, with the same error message.

I know you don't work there anymore, and if you have any qualms or reservations about advising how to query Curtis Brown, I totally understand. But I'm just curious if you ever heard about bouncebacks like these & know what the problem could be. The emails are just text, sent from a Gmail account, with "Query for NAME: TITLE" in the subject line, so I can't imagine why they'd trigger a spam filter. I'm guessing I need to turn around & query in hard copy, but if I'm doing something wrong, I'd really like to know so I can fix it. But, of course, the last thing I want to do is bug anyone unnecessarily.

Thanks so much for any thoughts you may have on this and, more generally, for making so much information available on your blog. It's been a tremendous resource and, while I can't help being a complete nervous nellie, it's given me a lot of comfort to see that people like you are out there willing to help.

[Nathan Bransford]

Thanks for the note, Curtis Brown has been having some e-mail issues. I'll pass along your message to see what's happening. Meanwhile, probably best to send a paper query.

[Nathan Bransford]

Thanks again for this heads-up, they tell me it's been fixed now.

[triakis66]

No, no, thank YOU so much for following up on it. Really, really appreciate it!

Hope you have a great Thanksgiving!