Setting up Site Subscriptions

I am having trouble getting subscription notifications to work.

1. I want to be able to send notification of a new post on-demand. I assume by turning on "notify subscribers" in a post it will email all my site subscriptions. This isn't happening. My Joomla site is configured for backend mail server with same email.

2. What is the format of the email notification look like? The body of it?

Thanks