• open IFILE, '<', "$ifile" || die "Couldn't open file: $!";
  is buggy. Due to the operator order or precedence, it's equivalent to
  open IFILE, '<', ("$ifile" || die "Couldn't open file: $!");
  You want one of the following instead
  open IFILE, '<', "$ifile" or die "Couldn't open file: $!";
  open(IFILE, '<', "$ifile") || die "Couldn't open file: $!";
  open(IFILE, '<', "$ifile") or die "Couldn't open file: $!";
  (open IFILE, '<', "$ifile") || die "Couldn't open file: $!";
  (open IFILE, '<', "$ifile") or die "Couldn't open file: $!";

• Same goes for the second open.

• Why "$ifile" instead of just $ifile?

• Why '+>' instead of just '>'?

• /^@.*mail(\d+).*\z/xms
  can be simplified to
  /^@.*mail(\d+)/xms
  All three modifiers (xms) could be removed from the match operator, but they cause no harm here.

• The user doesn't need to see the program line number when he specifies a bad file name. If the error message is not good enough to identify a user error without resorting to a line number, it needs to be improved.

With changes applied:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my $ifile = shift;
my $ofile = 'new_data';

open my $ifh, '<', $ifile
   or die "Couldn't open DNS file \"$ifile\": $!\n";
open my $ofh, '>', $ofile
   or die "Couldn't create output file \"$ofile\": $!\n";

while (my $line = <$ifh>) {
   # is the line an MX record?
   if ($line =~ /^@.*mail(\d+)/xms) {
      # is it less than or equal to 8?
      if ($1 <= 8) {
         print $ofh $line;
      }
   }
   # print everything else to the new file
   else {
      print $ofh $line;
   }
}
[download]

You could make your program sipler and more flexible by using STDIN and STDOUT.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

#
# Usage:
#    fixdns infile > outfile
#
# Usage for in place editing:
#    perl -i fixdns dnsfile
#

while (<>) {
   # is the line an MX record?
   if (/^@.*mail(\d+)/xms) {
      # is it less than or equal to 8?
      if ($1 <= 8) {
         print;
      }
   }
   # print everything else to the new file
   else {
      print;
   }
}
[download]

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