DES Question

When using DES to encrypt email addresses, the total amount of data to be encrypted would be only 3 or 4 eight-byte DES blocks. My question is: Would CBC or CFB really be effective for such a small amount of data? Or would it be better to encrypt multiple times with transpositions in between (ie '4x3' DES as was described earlier in cypherpunks)? Second question: The DES code that I have (not written by me) has a comment section which describes filling all 16 subkeys seperately, thereby allowing a 128 byte key. Is there any significant advantage to doing this? Is there any reason that I should not do it? What is the purpose of the initial and final permutations?