URL equity preservation CAPS and underscore in URLS

[moneeshot]

I am helping a friend switch from Godaddy quick shopping cart to magento. Unfortunately the Godaddy cart automatically creates product and catalog URLS. Using caps, dashes and underscores. I can dupe the link text but magento only allows dashes and no caps, I'd rather not use caps or underscores anyway. So from what I understand I can fix this issue with htaccess 301 rewrites? Can anyone please provide examples on how to handle either or both issues, with either a link to an explanation of how this works or if you can explain it yourself that's great. I'm hoping there is some magic that can handle all the links and not have to create individual rewrites for every page, this site has over 500 products with hundred of external links so we want have to preserve the SEO rating and allow those unruly external links to work after the switch. Same domain so thats not an issue. Magento will be hosted on a VPS, version CE 1.9.2.0
Hopefully this is in the correct area for thid type of question