I've had surprisingly good luck the few times I've tried it - but using VPSs that were a bit more spendy and not known to be spamhavens helped, I think.

The cost of something like AWS SES or Postmark is so low as to make it almost not worth it, but it worked; not that I'd trust "real" email to it - but I was surprised that Wordpress setup emails were getting through with little config.