Unlike the patterns in rewrite rules, character case in templates is preserved. This is necessary when using rewrite rules to provide an interface to a mail system that is sensitive to character case. Note that substitution sequences like $U and $D that substitute material extracted from addresses also preserve the original case of characters.
When it is desirable to force substituted material to use a particular case, for example, to force mailboxes to lowercase on UNIX systems, special substitution sequences can be used in templates to force substituted material to the desired case. Specifically, $\ forces subsequent substituted material into lower case, $^ forces subsequent substituted material into upper case, and $_ says to use the original case.
For example, you can use the following rule to force mailboxes to lowercase for unix.siroe.com addresses:
unix.siroe.com $\$U$_%unix.siroe.com