Microsoft have released the MSN Toolbar for Internet Explorer.

With MSN Toolbar you can:

Search the Web from any Web page.

Use the Highlight Viewer to quickly locate your search words.

Use Quick Links to launch MSN Hotmail, MSN Messenger, and your personalized MSN home page.

Get rid of pop-up ads with the Pop-up Guard.

No doubt this will be massively popular amongst most home users… but how is it Microsoft always leave it till everyone else has made one before getting on the bandwagon?

Bill Gates says that email spam will soon be a thing of the past.

“…ultimately, Mr Gates predicted, spam would be killed through the electronic equivalent of a stamp, also known as “payment at risk”.

This would force the sender of an e-mail to pay up when an e-mail was rejected as spam, but would not deter senders of real e-mail because they could be confident that their mail would be accepted.”

How will this payment be enforced? By the ISP, hosting company or Microsoft? What about forged addresses?

If anyone has any other information, links or opinions, then I’d really like to hear about it.