Not sure what your work place back then was but we clearly had tons of emails sent in 2000 already. As to chat ICQ came out in 1996, as did AOL IM in 1997, Yahoo and MSN as well. They were very popular by 2000.
One of my funniest moments as an intern was helping one of my mentors accidentally delete her entire inbox. I can't even remember what we were trying to do with her inbox, but deleting the entire contents was not it. There was a moment of panic, then calm. She just told me: if it's important, they'll email me again. And we moved on and never spoke of it again.
