The survey, which took in responses from managers within the 10 largest public sector organisations, found that removing some limitations on email could increase productivity and actually help to lower security risks.
Researchers for the survey, which was sponsored by Virgin Media Business, found that unnecessarily tight restrictions on emails are putting confidential data at risk and impacting productivity.
Outdated limits on email size, says the report, are making it difficult for workers to send large file attachments.
As a result, staff are increasingly going to extreme measures to ensure that important messages are received. Unfortunately, the report notes that this new trend could be putting organisations at risk of data leaks whilst having a negative impact on productivity.
The study on mailbox limitations in the public sector found that 69% of workers cannot send or receive emails larger than 10 MB in size, and 89% are unable to send or receive emails in excess of 15 MB.
The average worker can only send emails of up to 12.5 MB in size and has just 140 MB of space in their mailbox. These tight restrictions mean that workers frequently find that they are unable to share big PDF documents, slideshows, images and video content.
According to Virgin, the major concern thrown up by the report is that some workers are taking things into their own hands.
As a result, the business service provider says it is seeing a trend towards staff uploading files to file sharing sites or sending them via personal webmail accounts.
Whilst this 'make do and mend' approach may seem to work, staff could be unwittingly placing their sensitive information at risk.
The report notes that restrictions on email size were originally introduced to conserve bandwidth, but advances in networking and communications technology mean that such tight limitations are no longer necessary. And with workers increasingly needing to share multimedia files with colleagues and customers, these limitations are becoming a real headache.
Commenting on the research, Andrew McGrath, Virgin's executive director of commercial business, said that, for millions of people email is an integral part of their job, but it can also be a major source of frustration.
"Many workers regularly find that emails bounce back because the recipient's mailbox is full or an attachment exceeds email size limits", he said.
"Often staff will attempt to get around the problem by sending a file using a personal email account, file sharing website, or unsecured USB device. But despite having the best intentions, these solutions can create more problems than they solve by potentially putting confidential data at risk", he added.
"With the average worker sending or receiving more than 160 emails a day it's high time that these restrictions were lifted."