rfc2822 April 2001

2.2.3. Long Header Fields

   Each header field is logically a single line of characters comprising
   the field name, the colon, and the field body.  For convenience
   however, and to deal with the 998/78 character limitations per line,
   the field body portion of a header field can be split into a multiple
   line representation; this is called "folding".  The general rule is
   that wherever this standard allows for folding white space (not
   simply WSP characters), a CRLF may be inserted before any WSP.  For
   example, the header field:

 Subject: This is a test

   can be represented as:

 Subject: This
  is a test

   Note: Though structured field bodies are defined in such a way that
   folding can take place between many of the lexical tokens (and even
   within some of the lexical tokens), folding SHOULD be limited to
   placing the CRLF at higher-level syntactic breaks.  For instance, if
   a field body is defined as comma-separated values, it is recommended
   that folding occur after the comma separating the structured items in
   preference to other places where the field could be folded, even if
   it is allowed elsewhere.

   The process of moving from this folded multiple-line representation
   of a header field to its single line representation is called
   "unfolding". Unfolding is accomplished by simply removing any CRLF
   that is immediately followed by WSP.  Each header field should be
   treated in its unfolded form for further syntactic and semantic
   evaluation.