I would suggest doing your match on the $part->effective_type rather than on the whole $head->as_string.

I'm not sure what you mean by the parser failing. Is that some other part of your program? This part works fine for me. I'd recommend structuring your loop more like this:

foreach my $part (@parts) {
    next unless defined $part->head;
    my $type     = $part->effective_type;

    my $filename = $part->head->recommended_filename || "";

    if ($type =~ m!application/applefile!i) {
      # print STDERR "skipping: $type $filename\n";
      next;
    }

    my @thispart = ($part->head->as_string,
                 $part->bodyhandle->as_string);

    if ($type =~ /^image/i || 
      ($type =~ /application|octet/i && $filename =~ /\.gif$/i)) {
    push @images, \@thispart;
    } elsif ($type =~ /^text/i) {
      push @text, \@thispart;
    }
}
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