I hear you. I ran into the same issue.
There’s actually a very nice solution baked in. Prepare your teaser or intro and your article. Put it all in the post.
Create a CTA. The call to action. You want to edit the CTA. Remove sponsored. Set it to only show in the email. You won’t need any text in the body. Set your link to have text like “read the full article”. Set your link to ?email-cta or something like that. Ghost will resolve it to being a link to your article with that as a query param. The param doesn’t actually matter.
Set the CTA to only show in email. Then save it as a snippet. You will use this snippet in every future article. I set mine to centered, but whatever works for you.
Place the CTA right under the summary, teaser, or whatever you want to send. Above the rest of the article.
Now to post the article, you do it a bit different. Highlight everything below the CTA. Cut it. Literally use cut. And you should have this backed up in Google docs just in case.
After cutting, sent your email and post to website. The whole thing. As soon as it says congratulations, hit the back button a couple times. Paste the body of your article below the CTA and hit “update”.
Congratulations! You sent just the top part and a link that goes to your article. Do a test where you just send this to a group of yourself to make sure you’ve got it down.
This hardly adds any time to the process. Maybe one minute. Works great.
I love snippets and I love the way ghost can automatically resolve links. Since I discovered this, I don’t think it would be worth their time to create a way to only send partials. This process solves it so effectively.
Just keep in mind that some readers would prefer to have it all in the inbox. I believe this improves our delivery though. And I want readers familiar with the website. So for me this is an easy choice.
Hope this solves it for you. Let me know if anything was unclear.