title: Interact with Akka actor outside actors
body: <p>I want to interact with Akka actors from my own thread. Currently, i do like so:</p>
  
  <pre><code>val res = Await.result(aref ? GroupReceive(fromRank), timeout.duration).asInstanceOf[T]
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But I am unsure how this actually interacts with my thread? I wish for the receive to be asynchronous, i.e. I want to hang up the thread while receiving to allow for some other work to be done. I just recently read about Akka inbox system. <a href="http://doc.akka.io/api/akka/2.1-M2/index.html#akka.actor.dsl.Inbox$Inbox@receive%28FiniteDuration%29:Any" rel="noreferrer">inbox akka api</a></p>
  
  <p>I think I recall that Await creates a new actor every time. What are the differences between await+ask and inbox, and can someone give me an example of how to create an inbox and use it to communicate with actors from "the outside" ?</p>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT</strong>
  Just to clarify, I don't want <strong>the same</strong> thread to continue working, I want it to stop hogging a cpu-core and leave other threads to work until it receives something, then wake up again.</p>