Has corporate email such as MS Exchange played a major role in the Project?

Project management is all about communication, emails one of the major communication channels

yes

Indeed it helped a lot in projects, as this offers advantage in transfering large amount of data with ease than other formats

Sure, i think that emails are the main communication channe in a project , because its documented and recorded by date and can recevied easily.

Yes. MS Project does interface with MS Outlook to automate communication between project team members.