thanks for the suggestions everyone. Looks like the mail load is higher than
I thought; at least if spam is included (most of which goes to /dev/null
anyway)

here's Mike Miller's one-liner:
[chrome at mailhost:~]$egrep '^From ' ~/Mail/procmail.log | gawk '{print $4"
"$5", "$7}' | uniq -c
    788 Aug 8, 2005
    743 Aug 9, 2005
    753 Aug 10, 2005
    723 Aug 11, 2005
    689 Aug 12, 2005
    613 Aug 13, 2005
    636 Aug 14, 2005
    781 Aug 15, 2005
    655 Aug 16, 2005
    918 Aug 17, 2005
    262 Aug 18, 2005


and here's Florin's one-liner:

[chrome at mailhost:~]$cd Mail
[chrome at mailhost:~/Mail]$   cat procmail.log | sed -n -e '/From [^@]*@/
s/.*  [^ ]* \([^ ]* [^ ]*\) .*/\1/p' | sort | uniq -c
   1531 Aug 
    753 Aug 10
    723 Aug 11
    689 Aug 12
    613 Aug 13
    636 Aug 14
    781 Aug 15
    655 Aug 16
    918 Aug 17
    262 Aug 18

looks like there's a bug somewhere in that line noise of a code that doesn't
deal with single-digit dates properly. 

I'll probably stick with Mr. Miller's code (partly because I can understand
it), but thanks for the suggestions everyone!

-- 
Carl Soderstrom
Systems Administrator
Real-Time Enterprises
www.real-time.com