SSH and Transferring Webmail (Or, why I'm a moron)

Hello.

I'm a brand new DreamHost user. Up until now, all of the webhosts I've done business with use cPanel so there's a bit of a learning curve I'm dealing with here.

I need to transfer a webmail account from my old host to DreamHost. I've determined through the wiki that I need to do this through SSH. I'm new to SSH but the pop2imap method claims to be "super EASY," so I figured that I would be able to figure this out.

I enabled SSH for my user account for the domain and everything; it was really easy. The wiki says to type in "ssh user@domain.com" into Terminal (I'm on a Mac) to login. Simple enough. However, I have not changed my nameservers to point to DreamHost yet because, if I'm reading the pop2imap instructions correctly, I need my domain to resolve at my old host in order to grab the mail off the server. I logged in using my DreamHost FTP URL as the domain and that seemed to work just fine. I followed the pop2imap steps and while it appears to be able to grab the mail off my old host, something keeps going wrong when it tries to import the mail to the new account. I keep getting this error:

[A bunch of lines pertaining to the messages grabbed]
Unable to connect to blingy.dreamhost.com: Invalid argument ...propagated at pop2imap line 147, <GEN0> line 11442.

blingy is my mail server according to my web panel. I honestly have no idea why it's not working - is it because I haven't changed my nameservers? I feel really stupid about this whole thing because it doesn't seem like it should be this difficult of a task. I think I almost get it, but there's obviously some critical step that is escaping me. Please help!

If I were to do it, it'd be something like:

ssh ME@garth.dreamhost.com

perl pop2imap --host1 mail.MYDOMAIN.com --user1 ME@MYDOMAIN.com --password1 XOXOXO --host2 spunky.mail.dreamhost.com --user2 ME@MYDOMAIN.com --password2 XOXOXO

I'm hosted on web server Garth, as shown in Account Status in the panel.
My mail is in the Spunky cluster, as shown in my Account Status dropdown in the upper right corner of the panel here.


But if I had to do this, I'd hope I had IMAP on my old server. Then I'd IMAP all my mail down to my client (Mail on the Mac), then change my account settings to point to spunky.mail.dreamhost.com, then Synchronize all accounts to upload my mail to IMAP. That'd be slower, but I'm lazy that way.

-Scott

Ahh, I had everything right but I neglected the "mail" bit in the dreamhost URL. I just tried it again and it seems to have worked.

I thought about synchronizing everything via Mail, but my old host doesn't have IMAP. This whole thing would have been easier if the person using the account wasn't so stubborn and would just use an e-mail client in the first place. Oh well!

Thank you, Scott. :)

Edited by holophoner on 03/01/08 11:34 PM (server time).