``receive "new message" pings from webmail services''
Time to nitpick, quite apart from Ru's comment (that I agree with, but I digress): This wording implies action by some other party, and that would be sending to some listening programme on the receiving desktop machine a notification that some "new message" is available. I think you'll find that's not quite how the technology works. Instead what'll happen is that once every N seconds some "any news yet from the email front?" inquiry gets sent to wherever, probably with lots of volume-increasing buzzword-y crud, possibly times the number of webmail services you're "receiving notifications from".
They might even improve efficiency somewhat by multiplexing multiple users per service and/or multiple services per user through a de/muxing middle service, but I strongly doubt they will.
As such this phrasing is misleading. Of course, I'm nitpicking, but in computer techie techie land, this sort of distinction is quite vital to quick fault finding and correcting, a few among other things. Thus, correct terminology is important. This quite clearly is not the right terminology, despite superficially seeming to be good enough. I leave figuring out better terminology to the creative juices at the el reg wordy words desk.