Rather than calling it “improved,” it is a wonder that whoever the people are who run Yahoo! didn’t borrow from George Orwell’s 1984 and say it was “doubleplusgood.” Yahoo! has “improved” its email service that has been used by millions for decades.

The email service, like so many others, is free. Always has been. You can pay for upgrades like tech dupport, but most people don’t. Obviously this has been a concern for the company in terms of revenue and expenses, hence the new, improved version.

I have no problems with changes to a free service. What I do object to is for someone to tell me they are improving things for me when obviously they aren’t. Don’t insult my intelligence.

The new improved Yahoo! Mail now gives me 20 gigabytes of storage capacity. That is a fair amount, more, if I remember correctly, than their major competitor. Sounds like a great deal, right?

Except, before the “improvement” I had a terabyte of storage. Fifty times as much. Most people wouldn’t fill that in a lifetime.

I admit, I used my email as a type of cloud storage. I didn’t delete things I might need again.

So, when Yahoo! made the change I was a few gigabytes over the new limit. I could get my terabyte of storage back if I paid a monthly fee. For something that used to be free.

There was a lot of stuff in my email I didn’t need, such as songs emailed to me during my radio career. Deleting several hundred mp3s to get below the 20 gig limit wasn’t hard, but it took a few hours. At my hourly billing rate it would have been cheaper to have paid for a year of increased storage. But it is the principle of the thing.

I might have been willing to pay if Yahoo! had been honest about the changes. Companies have the right to be compensated for their products and services, even multi-billion dollar high tech giants.

But don’t tell me something is an improvement when it obviously isn’t for me. We don’t need that sort of doubleplusungood Orwellian Newspeak.

Let’s leave that sort of thing to Donald Trump. He’s good at it.