Thank you for pointing me in the right direction and helping make my first post here a learning experience. What i got to finally work for me was

 my $var;
use MIME::Decoder;
my $decoder = new MIME::Decoder 'base64' or die "unsupported";
open (my $fh, "<", $attachfile);
open (my $STDOUT, '>', \$var);
$decoder->encode($fh, $STDOUT);
print $var;
close $fh;
close $STDOUT;
$smtp->datasend($var);
[download]