OSAKA - Japan's western prefecture of Osaka held Wednesday the largest prefecture-wide "e-mail sending" drill, simulating a massive earthquake in the prefecture and its surrounding Kansai area, local press reported. ?

The drill started at around 11 am local time under a scenario that the major quake centering in the Nankai Trough off Japan's Pacific coast, which stretches east of the country's main island of Honshu, directly hit the area.

Accordingly, the prefectural government tested its emergency notification system that automatically sends email alerts to all addresses of the mobile phone users in the prefecture, the report said. ?

In advance, all users were requested via website or other public media to switch on their mobile phones, and to check whether the sound of the notification alarm was instantly activated, or not in all cities and towns of the prefecture after the alert email was sent. ?

According to a spokesman of the prefecture, an estimated 3.5 million people participated in the drill that found no major coordination problem except that the prefecture's official website has been down since the morning hours due to excessive access by too many users.