switch from imap to pop?

Go into Mail > Preferences > Accounts.

Click on your IMAP account > Advanced > Remove the "Enable" check mark.

Click the plus sign at the bottom and add in your account as POP.

If you change your mind you can always come back in here and disable the POP account and re-enable IMAP.

If you are worried about lost data, just make sure you have backups before you do this. http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=42938

Hope that helps.

I'm just curious. Why would somebody go from IMAP to the old POP technology?
I updated to IMAP a while back and have found that syncing across devices carrying the same email is way more efficient. With IMAP I can delete on one device and is deletes off all devices.

The other benefit I found with IMAP is that the spam filters on my main machine delete as designed with the benefit that I now find that spam is also automatically deleted on my iPhone. I was so tired of deleting stuff off the iPhone under a POP protocol.