Dns for one site

I have one site (domain) that cannot receive email no matter what. Our DNS provider sucks at best. (won’t mention them by name) Can I add the email server by ip address in the host file? Will that work?

Subject: Definitely Worked for me in Test environments before.

This was windows, long time ago. I think there was a Setting in a configuration document to decide if local Adress resolution is used or not.