The line

    $message = s/<[^>]*>//g;
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does a substitution on $_, and assigns the result to $message. But $_ is undefined, so you get the error. What you want is =~ instead of =.

But this a pretty naive, and wrong, way of deleting HTML tags. Some cases where your program goes wrong:

    <IMG SRC = "foo.gif" ALT = "A > B">
    <!-- <BR> -->
    A < B or B > A
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Abigail