I based my code on japhy's solutions, none of which were stripping newlines, probably because Rhodium didn't specify if he wanted them removed, or the lines to be simply concatenated as-is into single list items.
$lines[ @lines + 1 - s -^\053|\012--g ] .= $_  while <DATA>;
This fails by adding an undef element to the array if a newline is not the final character in the file. Changing my original easy enough though, without any regex or substr nastiness: 
chomp, $lines[@lines - s/^\+//] .= $_ while <DATA>;

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   MeowChow                                   
               s aamecha.s a..a\u$&owag.print

In reply to (MeowChow) Re4: Look ahead and join if the line begins with a + by MeowChow
in thread Look ahead and join if the line begins with a + by Rhodium

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