Back when I worked at Google, a friend of mine got an unpleasant email from r@ because his Python script had a bug: it sent alerts to the individual characters of my-friend@google.com
I've heard his email causes issues for tons of internal systems at Google because a lot are coded with the expectation of a minimum of 3 characters for the left part of the email. May just be urban legend though.
Do "+" suffixes work for google.com addresses? Is r+pike@google.com the same account?
Yes and no. Yes, they belong to the same employee; no, each google.com mailbox needs to be approved, they are not automatically redirected unlike regular GMail addresses.