I believe that

open(FH,">>message.txt")
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will only make your filehandle available for appending to the end of a file. Changing it to "+>>message.txt", will make it available for reading as well. I don't know that your seek is of any use, or why it is there (been a long time since I have used it and so i might be mistaken).

apart from that:

$value =~ s/+/ /;
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should be

$value =~ s/\+/ /;
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as + is special in a regular expression.

Update:changed the second bit (i.e. s/\+~/=~/; Thanks Chady++

-enlil