According to https://emailclientmarketshare.com/ , gmail as a client has a market share of 16%, which doesn't cover the number of people using a desktop app or mobile device to access their email.
So we can guess that gmail is handling around 32, 33 billion emails per day.
I don't know what Dreamwidth's email volume is actually like, but http://www.dreamwidth.org/stats says that currently 4063 accounts have posted at least one entry in the last 24 hours. Let's posit that each of these journals has posted an average of 2 entries. I don't know what average comment stats are like, but I currently have roughly 30,000 entries in my journal, and 58,000 comments on those entries. I'd say that my comments are moderately active -- there are journals with less chatty readers, and roleplaying and socialization communities with far far more. But let's say that 2 comments per entry is average. Since I'm a paid user, I have signed up for a notification of every comment I send (as well as the notification that most people get when someone replies), and it's possible for people to subscribe to threads they're not a part of, so let's say that every comment left sends about 4 notifications. (Again, I don't know the real stats.)
So let's say: 9000 entries (rounding up), each generating 8 notifications. That's 72,000.
72 thousand is 0.00000218181 of 33 billion.
So at a guess, Dreamwidth is not such a significant blip on gmail's radar that a human being would ever be prompted to examine Dreamwidth's trustworthiness status, much less spend the time to select a form letter about changes to MX records and send it off to the address listed as the domain's administrative contact and review the answer when it comes back. (Assuming California minimum wage, that's about $0.50 for a 3-minute process.)
From my experience living and working in Silicon Valley, the "I know a person at $COMPANY" thing is calling in a moderate to major favor. This is what you do if you've already tried the official processes and there's genuinely no way forward, or if the official route leaves you dead in the water for a week or two. I don't have access to Dreamwidth's email stats, but from some of the patterns of grumbling, Gmail pitches some sort of woebucket over Dreamwidth's notifications maybe 4+ times a year.
Dreamwidth staff and volunteers do not, as a rule, help Google employees move house quite that often.
a friend at Google
It turns out that it's really hard to find out how much email traffic goes through gmail every day; at least, I wasn't able to find out directly.
According to http://www.radicati.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Email-Statistics-Report-2015-2019-Executive-Summary.pdf (stats for 2015, and predictions through 2019), there are over 205 billion emails exchanged per day.
According to https://emailclientmarketshare.com/ , gmail as a client has a market share of 16%, which doesn't cover the number of people using a desktop app or mobile device to access their email.
So we can guess that gmail is handling around 32, 33 billion emails per day.
I don't know what Dreamwidth's email volume is actually like, but http://www.dreamwidth.org/stats says that currently 4063 accounts have posted at least one entry in the last 24 hours. Let's posit that each of these journals has posted an average of 2 entries. I don't know what average comment stats are like, but I currently have roughly 30,000 entries in my journal, and 58,000 comments on those entries. I'd say that my comments are moderately active -- there are journals with less chatty readers, and roleplaying and socialization communities with far far more. But let's say that 2 comments per entry is average. Since I'm a paid user, I have signed up for a notification of every comment I send (as well as the notification that most people get when someone replies), and it's possible for people to subscribe to threads they're not a part of, so let's say that every comment left sends about 4 notifications. (Again, I don't know the real stats.)
So let's say: 9000 entries (rounding up), each generating 8 notifications. That's 72,000.
72 thousand is 0.00000218181 of 33 billion.
So at a guess, Dreamwidth is not such a significant blip on gmail's radar that a human being would ever be prompted to examine Dreamwidth's trustworthiness status, much less spend the time to select a form letter about changes to MX records and send it off to the address listed as the domain's administrative contact and review the answer when it comes back. (Assuming California minimum wage, that's about $0.50 for a 3-minute process.)
From my experience living and working in Silicon Valley, the "I know a person at $COMPANY" thing is calling in a moderate to major favor. This is what you do if you've already tried the official processes and there's genuinely no way forward, or if the official route leaves you dead in the water for a week or two. I don't have access to Dreamwidth's email stats, but from some of the patterns of grumbling, Gmail pitches some sort of woebucket over Dreamwidth's notifications maybe 4+ times a year.
Dreamwidth staff and volunteers do not, as a rule, help Google employees move house quite that often.