Kmail and special characters

Does anyone know how I can get Kmail to display and use accented characters such as é or ç withoug using something like kcharselect and copying the characters to the clipboard? I am using an English keyboard and want to be able to have access to accented characters from a range of different languages.

In VI, I can use keyboard combinations to display the characters, for example; using ASCII codes such as 0233. However, I cannot get VI to work as the external editor for Kmail - nothing happens and I mean nothing at all, not even normal characters.

Any ideas? Is there any way to get Kmail's default, internal editor to display these characters?

Ta muchly...