How does Gmail's periodic mail fetching work?

The problem with periodic refresh is that while it is good for some things that aren't too time critical, like e-mail fetching, it is not instantaneous. Therefore you wouldn't want to use it for something like chat where waiting even five seconds for a response is too long. You could decrease the polling interval and make a request once a second or even half second, but then you'd quickly overload your browser and waste resources.

One solution for this is to use a technique called ajax long polling (known by others as 'comet' or 'reverse ajax'). With this technique, the browser makes a long duration ajax request, one that does not return until there is new data available. That request sits on the server (you need to be running special server side software to handle this in a scalable manner, but you could hack something together with php as a demonstration) until new data is available at which point it returns to the client with the new data. When the client receives the data it makes another long polling request to sit at the server until there is more data. This is the method that gmail uses, I believe.

That is the gist of long polling, you have to make a couple of modifications because most browsers will expire an ajax request if it does not return after a long time, so if the ajax request times out the client has to make another request (but the timeout is usually on the interval of a minute or longer). But this is the main idea.

The server side implementation of this is far more complicated than the client side (client side requires just a few lines of js).

While I'm not sure of the exact gmail implemention, the AjaxPatterns site has a good overview of what they dub a Periodic Refresh: --> http://ajaxpatterns.org/Periodic_Refresh. I've always just referred to the style as a heartbeat.

The gist of their solution is:

The browser periodically issues an XMLHttpRequest Call to gain new information, e.g. one call every five seconds. The solution makes use of the browser's Event Scheduling capabilities to provide a means of keeping the user informed of latest changes.

They include some links to real-world examples and some sample code.