diff --git a/NEWS.md b/NEWS.md
index c5dadcbf2a..454abff8c6 100644
--- a/NEWS.md
+++ b/NEWS.md
@@ -287,6 +287,8 @@
 
 16. Rolling functions (`?froll`) coerce `logical` input to `numeric` (instead of failing) to mimic the behavior of `integer` input.
 
+17. The warning message when using `strptime` in `j` has been improved, [#2068](https://github.com/Rdatatable/data.table/issues/2068). Thanks to @tdhock for the report.
+
 
 ### Changes in [v1.12.2](https://github.com/Rdatatable/data.table/milestone/14?closed=1)  (07 Apr 2019)
 
diff --git a/R/data.table.R b/R/data.table.R
index 6092517398..fa594c79db 100644
--- a/R/data.table.R
+++ b/R/data.table.R
@@ -1155,7 +1155,7 @@ replace_order = function(isub, verbose, env) {
   SDenv = new.env(parent=parent.frame())
   # taking care of warnings for posixlt type, #646
   SDenv$strptime = function(x, ...) {
-    warning("POSIXlt column type detected and converted to POSIXct. We do not recommend use of POSIXlt at all because it uses 40 bytes to store one date. Use as.POSIXct to avoid this warning.")
+    warning("strptime() usage detected and wrapped with as.POSIXct(). This is to minimize the chance of assigning POSIXlt columns, which use 40+ bytes to store one date (versus 8 for POSIXct). Use as.POSIXct() (which will call strptime() as needed internally) to avoid this warning.")
     as.POSIXct(base::strptime(x, ...))
   }
 
diff --git a/inst/tests/tests.Rraw b/inst/tests/tests.Rraw
index 2ac7a799c7..0a6b04f73f 100644
--- a/inst/tests/tests.Rraw
+++ b/inst/tests/tests.Rraw
@@ -8244,7 +8244,7 @@ ll = list(a=as.POSIXlt("2015-01-01", tz='UTC'), b=1:5)
 test(1612.1, as.data.table(ll), data.table(a=as.POSIXct("2015-01-01", tz='UTC'), b=1:5), warning="POSIXlt column type detected")
 dt = data.table(d1="1984-03-17")
 ans = data.table(d1="1984-03-17", d2=as.POSIXct("1984-03-17", tz='UTC'))
-test(1612.2, dt[, d2 := strptime(d1, "%Y-%m-%d", tz='UTC')], ans, warning="POSIXlt column type detected and converted")
+test(1612.2, dt[, d2 := strptime(d1, "%Y-%m-%d", tz='UTC')], ans, warning="strptime() usage detected and wrapped with as.POSIXct()")
 ll = list(a=as.POSIXlt("2015-01-01"), b=2L)
 test(1612.3, setDT(ll), error="Column 1 is of POSIXlt type")