Personally, I think civil disobedience is more effective at changing the status quo than e-mail campaigns, although they can help to increase awareness. What I would really like to see is a big institution / university take a stand and build something like Scihub to provide free and unlimited access to all of their own papers, even those that are stuck behind a paywall for "historic" reasons. It would be interesting to see if the publishing industry would dare to sue them in that case, as this could easily tip the public opinion against them.
In the end, I think the publishers know perfectly well that their business models have been made obsolete by the Internet long ago and that their value proposition is getting smaller and smaller, so they just want to squeeze the last remaining profits from their historically earned privileged position.