Ask HN: How do you protect your email address from spam?

I have had a nice email address for a long time and would like to keep it. But the amount of spam I get on it is annoying, over 20 spam mails per day.

Is there a good way to block the spam without it even hitting my laptop?

It seems the main problem is that hosted mail servers accept spam in the first place. Wouldn't it make sense to disallow blacklisted IPs right during the connection phase, so that they can't even send data to me?