Email post notification

Does WP have any functionality to send an email notification of new posts to a user how wants to sign up for one, out of the box? Or, are we supposed to use a plugin? I went down the later path, but the main one that comes up looks like it built for ver. 2.1 or something and it requires another plugin just to get the email working. Does 3.0 have any new tricks for doing this?

I’m happy to use a plugin, but I can’t tell if any are compatible with 3.0. I was going to setup WP-Mail-SMTP but that errors with a permission(likely file write) but I can’t find if it should even work on 2.9+.

Thanks much
Rich