Not all email clients behave the same. The specific behavior does not need to comply (AFAIK) to any standard. My copy of Thunderbird, by the way, first sends the file, and I can see the "sent" progress line while it does so.
However, Microsoft Outlook may consider a mail as "sent" when it is placed into the "Outgoing" folder (I last checked in the beginning of the 2000s... so maybe has changed).
Depending on the actual requirements of your application, you may want to consider to log the message ID or handle when sending it, and then track it inside Thunderbird (programmatically) to locate whether it has moved into the "Sent" folder.