You could literally just remove the s.gif (assuming s stands for "spacer" which is a very very old school web development technique) since the text would give implicit height anyways.

<td bgcolor="#000000" align="center"><a href="#" style="color: #fff;" target="_blank">John Doe</a></td>

https://imgur.com/a/udpE1JN

And _that_ will replace software engineers?