title: Using Futures in Akka Actors
body: <p>I'm just starting to learn Akka Actors in Scala.  My understanding is that messages received by an Actor are queued in an Actor's mailbox, and processed one at a time.  By processing messages one at a time, concurrency issues (race conditions, deadlocks) are mitigated.</p>
  
  <p>But what happens if the Actor creates a future to do the work associated with a message?  Since the future is async, the Actor could begin processing the next several messages while the future associated with the prior message is still running.  Wouldn't this potentially create race conditions?  How can one safely use futures within an Actor's receive() method to do long running tasks?</p>