No, Feedburner is not a part of the boat.
For email subscriptions, I used Feedburner, also by Google. When someone subscribes to the blog, Feedburner sends an email of the post automatically, not me. Feedburner was built-in to Blogger so it was easy for me as a beginner.
2 years ago Google decided to stop supporting Feedburner and not allow new email subscriptions but would continue to send emails to people already subscribed.