It's Opera Mail 1.0(or whatever), not a carbon copy of Gmail. Better to launch with less features and see which direction to take the product.

Release early, release often. The best strategy for a new product.

Gmail was 1GB to start out, and people thought that was enormous.

Things have changed quite a bit since 2004. The competition back then only offered a few mb.

I am currently only using about 200 MB for my personal account, so this would be fine for me. I have emails going back ten or so years, but those are thing I purposely kept. I never really bought into Google's assertion that I should never delete anything and just use search to find what I need. I understand that some people have way more than 1 GB of mail, but for me and other email users like me the amount of space opera is offering will last for years to come.

Because at the time the standard was 4MB. Gmail has raised the bar permanently.